Thread by @realscientists

[Intro thread] Hi everyone! My name is Kim @KimTommy92 and I have recently completed my Masters degree @WitsUniversity in palaeoanthropology! I decided to take a year off before starting a PhD and I am currently the science communication officer for @CoE_Palaeo!

I’m joining you today from my home in Johannesburg South Africa 🇿🇦. #ProudlySouthAfrican. My home country has a rich and beautiful fossil record and you might already know the names of the hominins I research.

As I mentioned I am a palaeoanthropologist so I study the evolution of our species modern humans. This is a really broad field with many amazing researchers looking at the questions “Who are we? And where did we come from?” from a variety of different perspectives.

I am a functional morphologist, so I am really interested in how our bodies have changed and why. In particular I focus on walking. Why do we do it? How has it benefited us? And who started walking upright first?

In order to (attempt) to answer these questions, I studied the ankle bones of humans as well as other primates and some extinct members of our family tree known as hominins.

The hominins I study have been found @MaropengSA The Cradle of Humankind, 20 minutes away from my home!

But why the ankle of all bones right? Well your ankle is really important to walking. I discovered this the hard way. I was on a workshop at the National Museums of Kenya in 2016 when I twisted my ankle while walking through the local market in search of food.

(Still got a snack- although I limped for the remainder of the trip, it was well worth it!) so you could say my research topic chose me! Maybe that’s why we started walking upright? The craving for snacks and the need to free our hands to carry them!

Back to the research!

The advancement of technology such as MicroCT has enabled me to look inside bones that are millions of years old in order to study, what I call, our bone diaries. This is our trabecular bone and is very sensitive to changes in posture and locomotion

I looked at trabecular bone in modern humans and found patterns that differentiate them from extant primates like chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and baboons. A signal that reflected how we shift our weight when we touchdown with our heel and push off on our big toe

Other apes are a lot more versatile in their movement, they can walk on two legs, walk on all fours, climb up vertical substrates and swing through tree canopies and their bones reflect that! Giving me an insight into their everyday movements

The fossil hominins I studied are from Sterkfontein Member 4 and Member 5. They are attributed to a species known as Australopithecus africanus. One of the most famous fossils from this species is the Taung Child

These are the beautiful fossil distal tibiae I worked with! These fossils are aged at almost 2.8 million years old! After having these beautiful bones MicroCT scanned I was able to compare their trabecular bone to that of my modern sample.

And what I found is that although this species probably walked on two legs, they didn’t do it exactly like we do today. They were unique, they were navigating their landscape in ways we don’t observe in living species.

This piece is a great summary of my research!

A short essay I wrote in 2017! I was named one of South Africa’s Top 20 postgraduate writers by @ScienceTodayZA

sciencetoday.co.za/2017/12/01/the…