Dr Emmy Bocaege will be joining the School of Anthropology and Conservation at Kent from the beginning of next year. Currently doing postdoctoral research at the University of Bordeaux, Emmy will be coming to Kent to work alongside Dr Patrick Mahoney and the Skeletal Biology Research Centre (SBRC) as a dental anthropologist for three years. The prestigious fellowship comes with an award of £300,000 to be dedicated to her research. Emmy’s project is titled ‘A micro-evolutionary perspective on tooth size at the origins of agriculture in the Levant’. The School looks forward to welcoming Dr Bocaege to its growing postdoctoral research community.
Abstract: The development from a hunter-gatherer to a farming lifestyle occurred first in the Near East (12000-7000 BC). Small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers led to larger settled populations, and this was accompanied by changes to the human skeleton that are retained in the present day. One of the most striking changes was the development of smaller teeth. The cultural reasons behind dental reduction (changes in food preparation techniques and population density) have been heavily debated in the last decades. However, the underlying growth processes that facilitate this change are largely unknown. By integrating data from different state-of-the-art methodologies and using samples spanning the period of change, this project will reveal the fine details of the growth mechanisms that facilitated dental reduction during this key moment in human socio-economic development.