Erin DiMaggio
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
About 6 million years ago, the human lineage first split from the lineages of other apes. Fossil sites from this time are extremely rare.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
human origins
hominin evolution
paleontology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Recover fossils from 6-million-year-old sites to document the animals that lived around the time the human lineage emerged.
- Reconstruct local climate, vegetation structure and herbivore diets using phytoliths (microscopic plant silica) and stable isotopes from ancient soil carbonates, leaf waxes and fossil tooth enamel.
- Refine the age and geological setting of the sites, and link them to other fossil sites, using tephra (volcanic ash) analysis, stratigraphic measurements and high-resolution mapping.
More about the research
As a result, little is known about the environments in which our earliest ancestors lived or about the animals that lived alongside them. This collaborative project studies 6-million-year-old fossil sites in a key region for understanding hominin origins. It collects fossils, evidence of ancient environments, and geological data that place these sites in time and space.
Why it matters
This is basic science on where and how human ancestors first evolved. Fossil and environmental records from sites dated to the origin of the human lineage could clarify the climate, vegetation and animal communities of that time. This knowledge could inform long-standing questions about how environmental change relates to early human evolution.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Deming Yang
Midwestern University-Downers Grove, IL·Ecology & Evolution
Recover fossils from rare 6-million-year-old paleontological sites to document the animal communities present when the human lineage first emerged.
John Kingston
University of Michigan, MI·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct the environments surrounding the ape–hominin divergence through systematic analysis of fossil vertebrate collections together with phytolith, pollen and n-alkane plant records.
Alexandra Greenwald
University of Utah, UT·Social Science
Reconstruct the mobility and residential histories of 41 ancestors from a 12,000-9,000-year-old Bay Area mortuary site using strontium isotope analysis of tooth enamel, which records the geology of where a person lived as the enamel formed.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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