I was born and raised in upstate New York, and owe my
interest in natural history to my upbringing on a farm. I learned about
plants, animals, and the stars from my parents, who inspired and promoted
my interest in science from a young age. I particularly enjoyed looking
for fossils in the beds of small creeks on our property, and digging for
“relics” under the trees near our house.
Although watching television was not a major part of my upbringing, I
vividly remember watching a National Geographic special aired in the
mid-1960s on the famous paleontologist, Louis Leakey, and his
explorations and discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. This
program, with its dramatic view of the ancient hominid then called Zinjanthropus
boisei or “The Nutcracker Man” ignited my imagination
like nothing had ever done before. I immediately proclaimed to my mother
that, “That is what I want to do when I grow up.”
I have had an insatiable curiosity about human evolution ever since, and
have had the tremendous good fortune of being able to follow the dream
that Leakey’s program inspired that night. I pursued an
undergraduate degree in biology at Bryn Mawr College, concentrating on
the then nascent field of molecular biology. Despite my parents’
wishes for me to attend medical school, I was pulled in another and far
less practical direction. Having enjoyed undergraduate courses in
anthropology, I realized that my heart was really in the study of human
evolution.
I elected to go to graduate school at The University of Washington in
biological anthropology, hoping at the time to specialize in the emerging
field of molecular evolution. Although this was an appealing possibility,
I found myself increasingly drawn to studies of comparative anatomy and
paleontology. What I saw in these fields was the potential to reconstruct
the appearance and lifestyles of animals long extinct, including our
closest nonhuman and human relatives. It did not take me long to settle
on a dissertation topic involving the anatomical study of the masticatory
apparatus of a little-known living monkey, Theropithecus gelada,
that was the only living representative of a diverse and highly
successful lineage of large African monkeys during the Pliocene and
Pleistocene.
My Ph.D. research took me to interesting places, including the Department
of Anatomy at the University of Hong Kong, where I undertook dissections
of a large collection of the gelada, and developed an interest in living
overseas. Upon completion of my doctorate, I took my first professional
job as a Lecturer in that department, a position that I held from 1981
through 1990. In the 1980s, it was common for biological anthropologists
and paleontologists to be employed as teachers of gross anatomy in
medical schools. I was fortunate to be hired by a department that allowed
me to pursue my research in paleontology and comparative anatomy, even
though it was not considered mainstream biomedical research.
Living in Hong Kong during the early years of the re-opening of China to
outside thought and commerce was a research anthropologist's dream. I
realized that many of the nonhuman primates of China were very poorly
known to science, and that it might be worth pursuing research on them.
Beginning in 1982, I cultivated a professional relationship with the
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing,
and then in 1984 with the Kunming Institute of Zoology. Thanks to
forward-looking administrators at both institutions, it was possible for
me to begin to undertake collaborative research at both institutions
– relationships which I have maintained to the present day.
During the latter 1980s and early 1990s, my research concentrated on the
evolution of Old World monkeys in East Asia, with an emphasis on the
evolution of the endemic species of China. Research on the living
snub-nosed monkeys and their antecedents occupied much of my time because
virtually everything that we studied about the animals was new to
science. At the same time that I was pursuing this research, I developed
a strong interest in the integration of paleoenvironmental and
paleontological research. I was strongly motivated by the concept of
examining the relationships between environmental change and changes in
animal diversity, distributions, and anatomies. Because of the excellent
record of environmental change known from geological, geochronological
and paleobotanical data for the late Tertiary and Quaternary in China,
integration of data on fossil occurrences and anatomies with
environmental data was possible, and yielded results of great interest
and import. This is one of the most interesting and fertile areas in
paleontology today.
In 1990, I relocated to Australia with my husband, George Chaplin, and
spent the next four years teaching in the Department of Anatomy and Human
Biology at The University of Western Australia in Perth. These were
extremely productive, and in hindsight momentous, years because they
marked my transition from a “bones only” paleontologist to a
more broadly based evolutionary anthropologist and paleobiologist. It was
during those years that I began research on the evolution of human
bipedalism and the evolution of human skin color, two of the longest
standing research problems in anthropology. These research programs began
by accident, not design, but I quickly realized that research on these
topics was clearly needed. The evolution of bipedalism and skin color,
like many others in biological anthropology, is avoided by most
professionals because it is assumed that they are intractable –
that we will never have the data necessary to prove any given hypotheses
or theories – and that it is folly to even address them because the
results are just “fairy stories”. It has always been my
opinion that research on such topics was worthwhile because one could,
using the robust tools of comparative and historical biology, make
logical deductions about what probably happened in the past. By looking
at all the comparative anatomical, physiological, environmental,
behavioral and other data available, one could determine how consistent
the predictions of various hypotheses were with the facts provided by
living organisms. This premise is the foundation of my research on
evolution of bipedalism and human skin color.
I took up my current position as the Head of the Anthropology
Department at Penn State in August 2006, following 12 years at the California Academy of Sciences. My appointment at the Cal Academy
permitted me to pursue diverse research interests, and ones that
often required long periods of work overseas. I am now delighted to be back in a university setting, where I am in regular contact with a great diversity of students and faculty.
Although my greatest interest in paleontology is in the fossil record of
Old World monkeys, virtually everything I find ignites my interest. I am
currently involved in five research initiatives: human and primate evolution, evolution of Old World monkeys, evolution of bipedalism in the human lineage, evolution of human skin coloration, and evolution of environments and mammalian
faunas of East Asia.
My abiding interest remains much as it was when I was a child – to
reconstruct the appearance of animals, including humans, long extinct and
re-create for myself and others the intricacies of past environments.
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