News

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

A month ago, we have had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Emiliano Bruner, one of the major experts on paleoneurology and cranial functional morphology. He gave a wonderful lecture on paleoneurology in our human anatomy course, and he has also given a wonderful seminar titled “Paleoneurology and morphological integration: a perspective in medicine and evolution”.   A big thanks to Dr. Bruner. You can follow his blog full of very interesting articles on human evolution, and in particular on paleoneurology:

We have a new 3D printer, the Form 2 from formlabs (which we share with Dr. Adams lab), and we are currently experimenting the creation of 3D prints of our dental cast collections. The results so far are amazing! Here a video on how this 3D printer works: Video More information on https://formlabs.com/ Luca

Paleo diet? The opinion of a biological anthropologist Followers of the Paleo diet nutritional plan base their eating habits on our ancestors’ traditions from the Paleolithic period, between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago, before agriculture and industry. Or do they? We talked about it with Luca Fiorenza, Senior Lecturer and head of the Palaeodiet Research Lab at Monash University. You can listen the radio interview (in Italian) on the following link: http://www.sbs.com.au/yourlanguage/italian/en/content/paleo-diet-word-anthropologist-biologist

Here a photo of the seminar about the paleo diet myth I have given at the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at Monash University.