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The final talk in the CHES Lecture Series for this academic year was today by archaeologist Yotam Asscher of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Dr. Asscher discussed the challenges of rescue excavations in Israel. He described in fascinating detail how mobile laboratories and portable instruments working in places like Caesarea provide crucial information fast, which is invaluable for the success of these rescue efforts and thereby contributing significantly to our understanding of the history of region.
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Anthropologist Brian Wood (University of California, Los Angeles) spoke today on sex differences in space use and spatial cognition among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Dr. Wood has been studying the Hadza for well over a decade, during which he has amassed a large array of data, some of which he shared today. Among the Hadza, both men and women contribute to the group's daily food intake: women collect approximately 4-6 kg of food each today, primarily in the form of underground tubers, whereas men focus on hunting ungulates, the carcasses of which are brought back to settlements. Dr. Wood also conducted a series of experiments carefully designed in light of cultural practices of the 
Hadza, the results of which suggest that men score significantly better on navigation and mental rotation tests. Dr. Wood interprets these experimental results in light of the different foraging strategies of men and women, which tend to produce much longer and much more circuitous travel paths for men, as revealed by individual GPS units worn by individuals each day. Men also spend significantly more of their foraging time alone, compared to women who are in small groups throughout the gathering period. A lively discussion followed the fascinating lecture.
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Last night's "Featured Research" Evening highlighted the research CHES Graduate Affiliate Fred Foster is doing on the microstructure and mechanical behavior of primate tooth enamel. Fred is applying methods from material science engineering to look inside the teeth of extant primates and link fine details of dental structure to functional (adaptive) properties that help teeth resist failure or damage when chewing challenging foods. The research will shed much light on dietary ecology in primates, but ultimately Fred will carry the insights he gains to the hominin fossil record, where he will address and resolve questions about the evolution of teeth and diets of extinct hominins.
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At last week's annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Cleveland, Ohio, CHES Graduate Affiliate Will Aguado was awarded the Sherwood Washburn Prize for best podium presentation by a student. His lecture was entitled "Effective seed dispersal of an economically important plant resource by western chimpanzees at Fongoli, Senegal”.
Congratulations, Will!
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CHES Graduate Affiliate Melanie Fenton was just awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research "Contextual and physiological correlates of complex behavioral strategies in primates." Melanie's research investigates aspects of the "third mechanism" added to Darwin's sexual selection theory: sexual conflict. She's currently in the field collecting behavioral and hormonal data on wild olive baboons to test hypotheses about how females respond to coercive versus friendly interactions with males, and ultimately how these interactions affect mating success. Olive baboons are especially useful subjects for such a study because the nature of social relationships between males and females varies tremendously compared to other primates, from close, affiliative bonds to aversive, antagonistic relations.
The broader impacts of Melanie's research include undergraduate laboratory training here at Rutgers as well as a major project promoting education of Kenyan school children about conservation and human-wildlife conflict in their country and globally. Working with a Kenyan scientist and local conservation organizations, Melanie will be regularly visiting several primary schools in Kenya over the course of her 18-month study, doing exercises with the students and assessing their effectiveness in achieving the educational goals she has set.
As a recipient of the CHES Albert Fellows Dissertation Research Award, further details of Melanie's study can be found here.
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CHES Graduate Affiliate Fred Foster was recently awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research "Microstructure and mechanical properties of primate dental enamel." Fred is using methods from material science engineering to study the adaptations in teeth that help them perform and resist failure over lifetimes, which are relatively long in the nonhuman primates.
The broader impacts of Fred’s project will contribute to advancing and developing biomedical engineering, one of the fastest growing job markets in the country. For example, Fred’s work will improve the curriculum in Biomedical Engineering program here at Rutgers, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, partly by developing a laboratory component that emphasizes the value of understanding the mechanical properties of teeth in biomedical engineering applications.
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Dr. Ashley Hammond, who recently was appointed Curator of Biological Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, gave a lecture today on the evolution of bipedalism and hip anatomy in humans past and present. Dr. Hammond's research takes her to a number of fossil sites in East Africa, where she and her team are unearthing the remains of human ancestors as well as extinct apes of the Miocene epoch (23 - 5 million years ago). She is also pursuing extremely detailed analyses of hip anatomy using museum specimens. As she made clear in a fascinating lecture, Dr. Hammond's research is shedding much light on that initial innovation that in a sense launched the human lineage about 6 million years ago: walking on two legs.
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Erin Vogel recently received the Robert W. Sussman Award for Scientific Contributions to Anthropology. Congratulations to Erin!
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CHES Grad Affiliate Tom Conte passed his doctoral dissertation defense this afternoon. Tom's dissertation, Steppe Generosity: Cooperation , Labor Sharing, and Generous Giving Among Mongolian Pastoral Nomads, is based on his 9-month study of pastoralist families in Tosontsengel, Mongolia, one of the most challenging and beautiful environments on the planet. Tom combined ethnographic methods such as participant observation with the implementation of carefully designed economic games, to generate data clarifying the influence of kinship, individual reputation, social networks, and environmental disasters (the "dzud") on human cooperation. The members of Tom's dissertation committee were Lee Cronk (Chair), Dorothy Hodgson, Ryne Palombit, and outside committee member, Simon Wickham-Smith. Congratulations, Tom!
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The Third Lembersky Conference in Evolutionary Studies this coming October will focus on "Advances in Primate Nutritional Ecology, Health, and Energetics". CHES member Erin Vogel (far left in photo) has begun work with collaborators and co-organizers Jessica Rothman (Hunter College, middle in photo) and David Raubenheimer (University of Sydney, far right in photo) on the scientific program, which will examine how nutrient availability varies in ecologically challenging habitats, how primates respond flexibly to this variation by modifying their nutritional strategies, and ultimately how the health of individuals is understandable in light of these processes. The conference will bring together a large group of international scholars and researchers who study both human and nonhuman primates The goal of the conference is not only to enhance significantly our understanding of extant human and nonhuman primate biology, but also to shed light on evolutionary models of hominin energetic responses to the environmental fluctuations that shaped our evolution.
