Tanya M. Smith is a human evolutionary biologist, and Professor at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University (Queensland, Australia).
Tanya Smith | |
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 Smith at the Australian Museum's 2019 Eureka Awards Gala in Sydney, Australia | |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Biological Anthropology |
| Sub-discipline | Human Evolutionary Biology |
| Institutions | Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), Griffith University |
Smith obtained her BSc Hons in Biology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo in 1997, [1] followed by her MA at Stony Brook University in 2002, and PhD in the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences at Stony Brook University in 2004. She received the Stony Brook University President's Award for Distinguished Doctoral Students in 2005.[ citation needed ]
Following her PhD, Smith was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology from 2004 - 2005, [2] then Research Scientist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology from 2006 - 2008. In 2008 she took up a position as Assistant Professor at Harvard University and from 2012 - 2016 Associate Professor. [3] During her time at Harvard she was also a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2013 - 2014, [4] and Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley 2015 - 2017. She moved to Griffith University as an Associate Professor in 2016, where she is affiliated with the Environmental Futures Research Institute, and Griffith Centre for Social Cultural Research. [5] In 2020, the Australian Research Council funded her Future Fellowship project "Illuminating behavioural and environmental influences on human development". [6]
Smith works broadly in the area of human evolutionary biology. Her research focuses on dental development and growth using histology, elemental chemistry, and advanced imaging techniques, and how dental tissues can be used to resolve taxonomic, phylogenetic, and developmental questions about great apes and humans. She works primarily on tooth microstructure, including the use of juvenile dentition for determining age at death, and how dental development correlates with aspects of an individual's life history, growth and reproduction. Her research has led to a major revision in the understanding of understand dental development in chimpanzees, and has demonstrated that living and fossil Homo sapiens have a prolonged period of dental development in comparison to Neanderthals and earlier hominins. [7] [8]
In 2018 she published her first book, The Tales Teeth Tell: Development, Evolution, Behavior, with The MIT Press. [9] A Chinese simplified character translation of the book is published in May 2022.
Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist specialising in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the neanderthal genome. He was appointed director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany in 1997.
Sarah Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She is considered "a highly recognized pioneer in modernizing our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates". In 2013, Hrdy received a Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is a research institute based in Leipzig, Germany, that was founded in 1997. It is part of the Max Planck Society network.
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Charles Loring Brace IV was an American anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan's Department of Anthropology and Curator Emeritus at the University's Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. He considered the attempt "to introduce a Darwinian outlook into biological anthropology" to be his greatest contribution to the field of anthropology.
Leda Cosmides is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology.
Zeresenay "Zeray" Alemseged is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who was the Chair of the Anthropology Department at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, United States. He recently joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. He is best known for his discovery, on 10 December 2000, of Selam, also referred to as “Lucy’s child”, the almost-complete fossilized remains of a 3.3 million-year-old child of the species Australopithecus afarensis. The “world’s oldest child”, she is the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor discovered to date. Selam represents a milestone in understanding of human and pre-human evolution and contributes significantly to understanding of the biology and childhood of early species in the human lineage; a subject about which we have very little information. Alemseged discovered Selam while working with the Dikika Research Project (DRP), a multi-national research project, which he both initiated in 1999 and leads. The DRP has thus far made many important paleoanthropological discoveries and returns to the field each year to conduct further important research. Alemseged's specific research centers on the discovery and interpretation of hominin fossil remains and their environments, with emphasis on fieldwork designed to acquire new data on early hominin skeletal biology, environmental context, and behavior.
Philip Lieberman is a cognitive scientist at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Originally trained in phonetics, he wrote a dissertation on intonation. His career has focused on topics in the evolution of language, and particularly the relationship between the evolution of the vocal tract, the human brain, and the evolution of speech, cognition and language.
Steven Mithen, is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He has written a number of books, including The Singing Neanderthals and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science.
Jean-Jacques Hublin is a French paleoanthropologist. He is a professor at the Max Planck Society, Leiden University and the University of Leipzig and the founder and director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He is best known for his work on the Pleistocene hominins, and on the Neandertals and early Homo sapiens, in particular.
Neanderthal anatomy differed from modern humans in that they had a more robust build and distinctive morphological features, especially on the cranium, which gradually accumulated more derived aspects, particularly in certain isolated geographic regions. This robust build was an effective adaptation for Neanderthals, as they lived in the cold environments of Europe. In which they also had to operate in Europe's dense forest landscape that was extremely different from the environments of the African grassland plains that Homo sapiens adapted to with a different anatomical build.
Alexandra (Alex) Z. Worden is a microbial ecologist and genome scientist known for her expertise in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes and their influence on global biogeochemical cycles.
Scladina, or Sclayn Cave, is an archaeological site located in Wallonia in the town of Sclayn, in the Andenne hills in Belgium, where excavations since 1978 have provided the material for an exhaustive collection of over thirteen thousand Mousterian stone artifacts and the fossilized remains of an especially ancient Neanderthal, called the Scladina child were discovered in 1993.
The study of geometric morphometrics in anthropology has made a major impact on the field of morphometrics by aiding in some of the technological and methodological advancements. Geometric morphometrics is an approach that studies shape using Cartesian landmark and semilandmark coordinates that are capable of capturing morphologically distinct shape variables. The landmarks can be analyzed using various statistical techniques separate from size, position, and orientation so that the only variables being observed are based on morphology. Geometric morphometrics is used to observe variation in numerous formats, especially those pertaining to evolutionary and biological processes, which can be used to help explore the answers to a lot of questions in physical anthropology. Geometric morphometrics is part of a larger subfield in anthropology, which has more recently been named virtual anthropology. Virtual anthropology looks at virtual morphology, the use of virtual copies of specimens to perform various quantitative analyses on shape and form...
Janet Kelso is a South African computational biologist and Group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is best known for her work comparing DNA from previous humans with those of the present.
Ruth Mace FBA is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.
Christina Warinner is an American anthropologist best known for her research on the evolution of ancient microbiomes. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and the Sally Starling Seaver Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. Warinner is also a Research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Denny is a 90,000 year old fossil specimen belonging to a 13-year-old Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid girl. To date, she is the only first-generation hybrid hominin ever discovered. Denny’s remains consist of a single fossilized fragment of a long bone discovered among over 2,000 visually unidentifiable fragments excavated at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains, Russia in 2012.
The Apidima Cave is a complex of four small caves located on the western shore of Mani Peninsula in Southern Greece. A systematic investigation of the cave has yielded Neanderthal and Homo sapiens fossils from the Palaeolithic era.
B. Holly Smith is an American biological anthropologist. She is currently a research professor in the Center for Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at The George Washington University. She is also a visiting research professor at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. The majority of her work is concentrated in evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, life history, and dental anthropology.
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