{"id":9565,"date":"2023-06-30T16:17:43","date_gmt":"2023-06-30T16:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=9565"},"modified":"2025-01-16T17:44:57","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T17:44:57","slug":"dextrous-digits-at-london-anthropolgy-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2023\/06\/30\/dextrous-digits-at-london-anthropolgy-day\/","title":{"rendered":"A High Five for London Anthropology Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

At LAD, everybody is into people; where they came from, how they live in different societies around the world and how they interact with their environment. So of course we were there too. <\/p>\n

London Anthropology Day<\/a> is an annual university taster day for Year 12 students, as well as undergraduate or graduate students interested in Masters’ degrees, organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute <\/a>and held at The Clore Centre for Education in Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Attendees came from across the UK and t<\/span>he University of Kent was represented this year by Lecturer<\/span>s <\/span><\/span>Dr Chris Dunmore<\/span><\/span><\/a>, <\/span>and <\/span><\/span>Dr N<\/span>atalie Morningstar<\/span><\/span><\/a> with<\/span> student Ab<\/span>i<\/span> Shortland.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Chris Dunmore’s workshop \u2018Dextrous Digits, how 5 million years of evolution shaped our extraordinary human hands’<\/strong><\/a> (a concise history of fingers with the help of some funky props) was a hands-down highlight!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The modern human hand is one of the defining anatomical characteristics of our species \u2013 empowering us to make and use tools that helped set us on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Participants were invited to wear specially made gloves which lengthened their fingers by several centimetres, so that they could feel what it was like to manipulate objects like an orangutan. In fact, they had a race to see who could put the most walnuts in a bowl fastest!<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018It changes what you\u2019re capable of doing.\u2019 Dunmore told us \u2018We asked a couple of volunteers to see who could move several nuts into a bowl the quickest -a very visual way of showing how manipulative ability is impeded by the greater finger length.\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018I asked everybody to match a range of (plastic) skulls to hands, we had an orangutan and modern human, well as several fossil species that are snapshots of our evolutionary history, including: <\/span>Australopithecus sediba<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Ardipithecus ramidus, <\/span><\/i>and a Neanderthal. , essentially by the end of the workshop everyone had a primer on \u2018How to be a paleoanthropologist\u2019.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018It was a really fun day. I love meeting students and hearing their fresh takes, it re-energises and re-enthuses me and reminds me why I do what I do.\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Student Abbie Shortland shows you around LAD, watch here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At LAD, everybody is into people; where they came from, how they live in different societies around the world and how they interact with their … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66395,"featured_media":9572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58,124,159350],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9565"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/66395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9565"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10051,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9565\/revisions\/10051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}