Deming Yang
Midwestern University-Downers Grove, IL·Ecology & Evolution
About 6 million years ago, the human lineage split from that of our closest ape relatives. Fossil sites from this period are exceptionally rare, so little is known about the environments in which the earliest human ancestors, called hominins, first evolved.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
human origins
hominin evolution
paleontology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Recover fossils from rare 6-million-year-old paleontological sites to document the animal communities present when the human lineage first emerged.
- Reconstruct local paleoclimate, vegetation structure and herbivore diets using phytolith analysis and stable isotopes from ancient soil carbonates, leaf waxes and fossil mammal tooth enamel.
- Constrain the age and setting of the fossil sites through tephra (volcanic ash) analysis, stratigraphic measurement and high-resolution geological mapping, linking them to other paleontological sites.
More about the research
This collaborative project studies 6-million-year-old fossil sites in a key region for human origins. The goal is to reconstruct the climate, vegetation and animal communities of that time and to learn about the evolutionary histories of related animals.
Why it matters
This is basic science aimed at a long-standing question: what conditions surrounded the emergence of the human lineage? Well-dated fossil and environmental records from about 6 million years ago could clarify the climate, vegetation and herbivore communities early hominins lived among. They could also inform broader ideas about how environment shaped human and mammal evolution.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erin DiMaggio
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Recover fossils from 6-million-year-old sites to document the animals that lived around the time the human lineage 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
Midwestern University-Downers Grove: 2 labs on PI Pages, $14M a year on research.
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