Investigating the Importance of Bone Marrow Consumption in Human Evolution

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Michael Pante at the Department of Anthropology and Geography of Colorado State University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the importance of bone marrow to the evolution of our human ancestors and the rise of hunting large animals for food. New technology will be applied to analyze bone breakage patterns related to marrow procurement from modern collections of broken animal bones as well as several zooarchaeological collections that are important for our understanding of human origins.

Subsistence underpins human economics, and both the introduction of large animals as a food resource and hunting represent dramatic shifts in subsistence that had profound implications for human social behavior such as cooperation, conflict, and cognition, and thus, major impacts on our evolutionary history.

The goal of this project is to test the role of bone marrow as the avenue by which early humans began using large animal food resources and its influence on the rise of the Human Predatory Pattern. Among primates, the Human Predatory Pattern (HPP) is the uniquely human behavior of hunting animals that are of equal or larger body size. Evolution of the HPP involves two key innovations: active hunting and exploitation of large animal food resources (LAFRs).

The inclusion of LAFRs in the human diet and the HPP may have set the stage for humans to become super-predators, and even precipitated the origin of our genus, Homo. Yet, the mechanism through which this behavioral pattern evolved is unclear. This project will leverage new technological advances in 3D scanning, digital characterization, and machine learning, combined with traditional methods, to analyze bone breakage patterns and test the recently proposed hypothesis that the HPP derived from scavenging large animals for in-bone nutrients.

This hypothesis predicts that early humans were breaking bones for marrow prior to other forms of butchery. This hypothesis will be tested by taking a diachronic approach that compares signatures of bone modifications made by early humans. Should the evidence confirm a transition in human exploitation of LAFRs through time, this would support the hypothesis, indicating that the rise of the genus Homo must be interpreted through the lens of scavenging for in-bone nutrients as the precursor to the HPP.

This project comprises substantial intellectual merit, both within archaeological sciences but also more broadly in any field where 3D object shape is used in research. First, it will advance our understanding of human evolution by testing a major hypothesis associated with the assembly of modern human behaviors. Second, it will advance knowledge of human-carnivore interactions between 3.6 Ma (Late Pliocene), 1.8 Ma and 0.9 Ma (Pleistocene), the earlier time period having received little attention in this regard.

Third, this project will develop methods of data extraction using 3D models that are effective for machine learning applications and broadly applicable to many other archaeological and paleontological assemblages. Fourth, this work extends collaborations among mathematicians, computer and data scientists, and paleoanthropologists to create innovative technological tools to enable researchers (within and beyond anthropology) to easily integrate their expertise with reliable and replicable mathematical approaches to research on objects.

Finally, this project will create an extensive open-access database of research-quality 3D models and datasets that will facilitate future research projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.