Palaeoanthropologist Tracy Kivell is a new Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA). She comes to us from the University of Kent in England, where she is a Professor of Biological Anthropology in the School of Anthropology and Conservation. Kivell is interested in understanding the emergence and evolution of our earliest fossil human relatives and our closest living cousins, the African apes. Her research focuses on reconstructing the locomotor behaviours and manipulative abilities of our fossil relatives through comparative anatomy, biomechanics and the study of living primates.
Exploring Human Origins
Over the last two decades, the field of Palaeoanthropology has uncovered numerous new fossil human (hominin) and archaeological discoveries that reflect a much greater diversity in morphology, behaviour, and potential adaptive strategies than ever imagined. However, we still know little about early human evolution, including the emergence of hallmark ‘hominin’ features like bipedalism and tool use, and next to nothing about the evolution of African apes, all of which are fundamental to understanding the diversity we see in later human evolution.
Kivell’s new Department of Human Origins will focus on addressing fundamental questions surrounding great ape and early human evolution through the understanding of behaviour in both fossils and living primates, including humans. “In addition to making new fossil and archaeological discoveries, our aim is to reconstruct behaviour in the past by integrating high-resolution imaging, quantitative analyses of anatomy, experimental biomechanics and the study of living primates, both in their natural environments and in zoos”, says Kivell.
Tracy Kivell received her Ph.D. in biological anthropology in 2007 at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her doctoral research focused on the developmental changes and functional morphology of the primate hand to address questions about the origin of human bipedalism. She then went on to do postdoctoral research at Duke University investigating the biomechanics of primate locomotion and teaching human anatomy within the Duke University School of Medicine from 2007-2009. Kivell continued her postdoctoral studies as a Junior Researcher in the former Department of Human Evolution led by Jean-Jacques Hublin at MPI-EVA from 2009-2013 investigating how internal bone structure of the skeleton may reflect behaviour during life. During this time, Kivell became director of research on hominin hand fossils from the Malapa and Rising Star paleontological sites in South Africa in collaboration with Lee Berger and remains an associated Research Fellow with the Centre for the Exploration of the Deep Human Journey at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2013, Kivell joined the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, continuing her focus on the evolution of the human hand through investigation of internal bone structure and the biomechanics of human and primate hand use. She started her position as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany in February 2023.
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The MPI-EVA was founded in 1997. Its seven current departments bring together researchers from more than 30 countries and with various scientific backgrounds. Their common aim is to investigate the history of humankind from an interdisciplinary perspective. In doing so, they draw on comparative analyses of genes, cultures, cognitive abilities and social systems of past and present human populations as well as those of primates closely related to human beings.
Contact:
Sandra Jacob
Press Officer
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
+49 341 3550-122
jacob@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de