News

Simultaneously with the 17th International Symposium on Dental Morphology the Spanish and Portoguese Primatological associations organised in Burgos (Spain) the VI Iberian Primatological Conference, where we presented (Dr. Emiliano Bruner) a work on Cranial integration and airorhynchy in Alouatta seniculus. You can have a look on the program on the following link: http://www.apespain.org/cip6/home/ Below a photo of our poster presented by Emiliano Bruner

The final stop-over of this long European tour was Bordeaux (France), for the 17th International Symposium on Dental Morphology (ISDM), a great conference with many interesting talks, where I met old and new friends. A great thanks to Dr. Priscilla Bayle who was behind the fabulous organisation of this event. https://isdm-iapo-2017.sciencesconf.org/ The venue of the conference was an old monastery reconverted  as an auditorium, definitely a unique place for a scientific meeting!

Last week I had the pleasure to visit the CENIEH, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, that is one of the major European research centers on Human Evolution. Is located in Burgos, in the northern Spain, very close to the archaeological site of Atapuerca, a UNESCO World Heritage site, containing human fossil remains from nearly one million till more recent times. I was kindly invited by Dr. Emiliano Bruner to give a talk on “Imaging and Analysis in

At the beginning of this week I have visited the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin to collect additional orangutan data for our research project on great apes ecology. In particular, I was looking to the Sumatran orangutans, ecologically and morphologically different from Bornean orangutans, and thus considerate a separate species, Pongo abelii. I need to thank Steffen Bock, the collection manager, who helped me during my stay at the museum. A wonderful natural history museum that I suggest you all

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the 7th Annual Meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) that was held in the beautiful Leiden in the Netherlands. It was a three intensive-days conference with many interesting talks and posters. We had several contributions: Luca Fiorenza, Huynh N. Nguyen, Stefano Benazzi. Macrowear and biomechanical analyses of great ape molars. Almudena Estalrrich, Luca Fiorenza, Ulrike Menz, Antonio Rosas, Ottmar Kullmer. Dental behavior and long-term dietary reconstruction

I have had the pleasure to visit the small, but beautiful, prehistoric museum in Ostuni (Museo Civilta’ Preclassiche della Murgia Meridionale, Apulia, Italy), where it is exposed the original skeleton of a young woman and her fetus, known as the Woman of Ostuni, that is dated to 28,000 years ago. The skeleton represents the oldest example of Paleolithic pregnant human female, who may have died due to problems during the pregnancy. Analysis of the fetal remains was published on Scientific

For the second year, we are carrying an archaeological excavation, coordinated by Prof. Stefano Benazzi, at Torre di Uluzzo near Lecce, in Southern Italy. We are looking at Middle and Upper Palaeolithic deposits with a a focus on the Uluzzian culture, that we still do not know if it was made by Neanderthals or by Homo sapiens.

I have been invited by Dr. Varsha Pilbrow from the Department of Anatomy at the University of Melbourne to give a seminar titled “Seven stories teeth can tell about human evolution”. The seminar was held in the Frederic Wood Jones theatre, named after one of the most influential anatomists and biological anthropologists of early 1900.

  Our manuscript on “Tooth wear inclination in Great Ape molars” has been finally published on Folia Primatologica: Knight-Sadler, J. Fiorenza L. 2017. Tooth wear inclination in great ape molars. Folia Primatologica 88: 223-236. https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/478775

We just got some original hominin fossil teeth from South Africa (here a molar of Paranthropus robustus) that will be analysed in our lab. Stay tuned