In 2013, six women entered a challenging cave system to excavate over 1500 hominin fossils from a single chamber in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. In 2014, a group of about 60 scientists, including myself, came together to systematically compare those fossils with previously known hominin remains. We examined all regions of the skeleton and often had multiple individuals to study for each skeletal element. We tested the null hypotheses that the Rising Star fossils did not differ from known hominin species. In all cases, the hypothesis was rejected. In this talk I will introduce you to the new hominin species that we announced in September 2015, Homo naledi.
Dr. Caroline VanSickle earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and her B.S. in Anthropology at Kansas State University. She is currently the Wittig Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and holds honorary research affiliations with both the Anthropology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and with the Evolutionary Science Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. As a paleoanthropologist, VanSickle's research focuses on the identification and interpretation of sex differences in the hominin fossil record based on the anatomy of the pelvis. She has studied original hominin fossil material at institutions in the U.S., Great Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Croatia, Israel, and South Africa. She is currently the lead researcher studying the Homo naledi pelvis.
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