Biographies of Authors

Prof. Lee Berger (Senior Team Leader)

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Prof. Lee R Berger is the Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science in the Institute for Human Evolution, School of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He discovered the site of Malapa in 2008, and, with his son Matthew, is the discoverer of the new species of early human ancestor Australopithecus sediba. He also discovered the female skeleton MH-2, the most complete early hominin skeleton yet discovered. 

He is recognised as an international explorer with over 20 years of expedition leadership to his credit. He is the Director and Principle Investigator of the Malapa Project and leads over 70 scientists in what has been described as one of the largest palaeontological projects in recent history.

Berger, an award-winning researcher, author and speaker, is the recipient of the Friedel Sellschop Award for Young Researchers and the National Geographic Society’s first Prize for Research and Exploration. His work has featured as Discover’s and Time Magazines top 100 Science Stories of the year on several occasions. He has written numerous books and over 75 academic articles. He has appeared in dozens of television documentaries and is a regular commentator on evolution and palaeontology. An acclaimed speaker, he has delivered invited lectures to hundreds of corporate, government and other prestigious organisations, including the World Summit for Sustainable Development, the Royal Geographic Society, the Time Fortune CNN Global Forum, the Young Presidents Organisation and the National Geographic Society.

He graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1989 and received his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994.  Lee is an Eagle Scout, and Boy Scout Honor Medal winner. He is an avid diver and PADI Divemaster. Lee is married to Jacqueline and they have two children – Megan and Matthew.

Tel: 27 11 717 6604
Mobile: 27 71 864 0860
Email: Lee.Berger@wits.ac.za / profleeberger@yahoo.com 
Web: www.wits.ac.za/sediba

Dr Robyn Pickering 

Lead Author and Uranium-Lead Dating Specialist  

Affiliations:

School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Dr Robyn Pickering is a McKenzie Post-Doctoral fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a geologist and geochemist who has dated the rocks surrounding the Australopithecus sediba fossils from Malapa, South Africa.

Robyn has been working on the geology of the South African hominin bearing caves since 2002 and has provided new stratigraphic interpretations for the cave sediments at a number of sites, including Sterkfontein. She has also produced the first suite of direct U-Pb ages for the caves in the Cradle of Humankind region and shown how the flowstone layers can act as markers to provide a correlation tool between sites. Her other projects in South African include the human occupation sites of Pinnacle Points on the southern coast, Wonderwerk Cave, the fossiliferous dune deposits along the west coast and a large scale, country-wide stalagmite dating project.

Originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, Robyn undertook her undergraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, majoring in Geology and Archaeology in 2001 and going on to complete an MSc in Geology in 2005. She received a PhD from the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2009. Robyn is a keen runner, cyclist and knitter and is engaged to her Kiwi field assistant Warrick.

Tel: 61 (0)3 8344 6531
Email: r.pickering@unimelb.edu.au
Web: www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/isotope/index.html 

Prof. Paul Dirks

Co –Author and Lead Geologist for the Malapa team

Affiliations:

Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

The School of GeoSciences, University of the Witwatersrand

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Prof. Paul Dirks is a structural geologist with an interest in geodynamics and the tectonic history of cratonic terrains and adjacent mobile belts, including mineralisation patterns and neotectonics. 

Prof. Dirks holds an MSc in Geology from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and a PhD in Geology from the University of Melbourne. While at Wits, Prof. Dirks was closely involved with palaeo-anthropology, and he was part of the management team that helped establish the Institute for Human Evolution, on which he served as a board member from 2005 to 2009.

In 2004, Prof. Dirks co-founded the AfricaArray Programme, an international, multidisciplinary research and training effort to investigate the structure and tectonics of the African plate, from the Earth’s surface to the core-mantle boundary. By linking mantle structure to the neotectonics of the African land surface, Prof. Dirks became involved in the structure of the Transvaal sequence rocks in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. Together with Prof. Lee Berger, Prof. Dirks recognised the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to finding new fossil sites in the Cradle, and in early 2008 they devised a plan to systematically investigate cave occurrences and to link them to active tectonic processes and structure in an attempt to better understand, and possibly predict, cave, and fossil distribution patterns. This mapping and data compilation project led to the discovery of the Malapa site in August 2008. Once discovered, Prof. Dirks took responsibility for leading the geological team in providing context to the spectacular new fossil finds.

Prof. Dirks is a Fellow of the Geological Society of South Africa, and past Chairman of the Geological Society Zimbabwe. He is the assistant editor of the South African Journal of Geology, and past editor of Gondwana Research. Prof. Dirks has authored and co-authored over 80 peer reviewed papers, 58 professional reports and over 120 abstracts, CDs, mineral databases and excursion guides.

Tel: 61 74781 5047
Mobile: 61 429 566120
Email: paul.dirks@jcu.edu.au
Website: www.jcu.edu.au

Mr Zubair Jinnah

Co-Author and Team Geologist

Affiliations:

Associate Lecturer, School of Geosciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Zubair Jinnah is an associate lecturer at Wits University in Johannesburg, where he is also studying towards a PhD. He specialises in sedimentology and is interested in depositional processes, stratigraphy and the external controls on sedimentation in fossil-bearing rock units.

Zubair completed his undergraduate degrees at Wits in 2005, and has since been working on a PhD project looking at Cretaceous rocks in the western United States, which contain a fauna of dinosaurs, mammals, turtles and invertebrates. During this time he has also been involved in research projects in southern and east Africa, on rocks and sediments from the Permian to the Quaternary that contain the fossils of dinosaurs, mammal ancestors (therapsids), crocodiles and hominids.

Since 2009, Zubair has been working on sites in the Cradle of Humankind, where he is interested in cave-fill processes and their effects on fossil preservation, as well as stratigraphic correlation of complex rock units.

Tel: 27 11 717 6554
Mobile: 27 83 655 9046 
Email: Zubair.Jinnah@wits.ac.za
Web: www.wits.ac.za/sediba     

Dr  Darryl de Ruiter

Palaeoanthropologist and Craniodental Team Leader

Affiliations:

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Dr Darryl de Ruiter is a paleoanthropologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

Originally from Canada, Dr de Ruiter received his Masters degree in Anthropology from the University of Manitoba (1995) and his PhD in Anatomical Sciences from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa (2001).

Dr de Ruiter is a ‘Ray A. Rothrock’ Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M and an Honorary Reader in the Institute for Human Evolution of the University of the Witwatersrand.

He has excavated at nearly every hominin fossil cave in South Africa, spanning the middle Pliocene to the late Pleistocene, and he currently directs two fossil exploration projects in the Free State.

He has published extensively on the hominins of South Africa, including both craniodental and postcranial remains. Dr de Ruiter is the lead craniodental specialist on the Malapa Research Project, and is responsible for the analysis of the cranium, jaws and teeth of the newly discovered Australopithecus sediba fossils.

In addition to his research into the anatomy of the hominins, Dr de Ruiter has also explored the ecology of both the hominins and the animal paleocommunities that accompany them. He has published more than 50 scientific papers in high impact journals such as Science, Nature, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the Journal of Human Evolution.

Tel: 1 979 845 4940
Email: deruiter@tamu.edu
Web: http://anthropology.tamu.edu/faculty/deruiter 

Prof. Steven Churchill

Palaeoanthropologist and Team Leader of the Post-Cranial Analysis

Affiliations:

Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham North Carolina

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Dr Steven Churchill is an Associate Professor and past chair of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University (United States). He received a BS from Virginia Tech and an MA and PhD from the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty at Duke in 1995. 

Dr Churchill is a human palaeontologist studying morphological and behavioural adaptation in Middle and Late Pleistocene Homo (such as Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and early modern humans). His research combines comparative functional morphological and biomechanical studies, experimental approaches and field work in southern Africa and southern Europe to best apprehend the adaptive shifts that occurred in the later stages of human evolution. 

Dr Churchill’s research has primarily focused on four inter-related areas: 1) The ecology, energetics and adaptive strategies of premodern members of the genus Homo; 2) The evolution of human subsistence strategies across the Middle and Late Pleistocene; 3) The evolution of subsistence technology; and 4) The community ecology of humans and large-bodied carnivores in Pleistocene Europe and Africa. 

Dr Churchill has been conducting fieldwork in southern Africa, in collaboration with Dr Lee Berger and others, since 1995. This fieldwork has as its goal the improvement of our understanding of the morphology and behaviour of Middle Stone Age-associated early modern humans and their immediate ancestors (African Middle Pleistocene archaic humans).

Dr Churchill holds a secondary appointment as an Honorary Reader in the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was formerly an associate of the Palaeoanthropology Unit for Research and Exploration in the Bernard Price Institute of Palaeontology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dr Churchill is responsible for leading the team of scholars working on the analysis of the postcranial remains of fossils from the Malapa site.

Tel:                  1 919 660 7314
Email:               churchy@duke.edu
Website:            www.duke.edu

Dr Andy Herries  

GeoChronologist and Palaeomag Specialist

Affiliations:

Director of UNSW Archaeomagnetism Laboratory and ARC Senior ResearchFellow, School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney, Australia

Dr Andy Herries is the Director of the UNSW Archaeomagnetism Laboratory and an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He specialises in the palaeomagnetic and mineral magnetic analysis of archaeological sites and cave deposits. One of his main focuses has been building a chronological framework for the southern African hominin bearing sites over the last 15 years. He undertook his BSc, MSc and PhD in Archaeological Science, Geoarchaeology and Geomagnetism at the University of Liverpool in the UK where he still holds an honorary research position. He completed his post-doctoral studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria and the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Dr Herries’ work has centred on creating a chronology for the South African hominin sites independent of correlations with eastern Africa by combining palaeomagnetic analysis with other geochronological methods. Currently he runs excavations and field projects in China and South Africa and is involved in further projects in Bulgaria, Australia, Kenya and Ethiopia. In South Africa his work has ranged from: studying Pliocene fossil sites at Langebaanweg; early australopithecine bearing sites near Johannesburg and at Makapansgat; middle Pleistocene fossils sites such as Elandsfontein and Cornelia; Middle Stone Age sites on the southern Cape coast; and Later Stone Age of the Ghaap Plateau. Dr Herries has also spent the last 13 years developing archaeomagnetic methods for identifying fire use by humans and reconstructing palaeoenvironments from archaeological cave sites.

Dr Herries is undertaking palaeomagnetic analysis at the Malapa site. Currently this centres on assessing the age of the hominin specimens and strata as well as identifying the age and pattern of small geomagnetic field oscillations preserved within the speleothems deposits. 

Tel: 61 (0) 2 9385 8508
Email: andyherries@yahoo.co.uk
Website: www.unsw.edu.au

Prof. Jon Woodhead

Affiliations:

University of Melbourne

Jon Woodhead completed his BA and D Phil studies at the University of Oxford before moving to Australia in 1988 to take up a post-doctoral research position at the Australian National University.

In 1996 he moved to the University of Melbourne and is currently a Professorial Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences. His interests encompass the broad application of isotope and trace element geochemistry to problems in the Earth and environmental Sciences, with a particular emphasis on technique development and innovation in MC-ICPMS and laser ablation technologies, and geochronology.

He is currently a joint editor-in-chief of Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research.

Tel: 61 (0) 2 8344 6821
Email: jdwood@unimelb.edu.au
Website: www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/isotope/Welcome.html

Prof. John Hellstrom

Affiliations:

University of Melbourne

Tel: 61 (0) 2 8344 7618
Email: j.hellstrom@unimelb.edu.au
Website: www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/isotope/Welcome.html

Dr Kristian Carlson

Affiliations:

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Department of Anthropology, Indiana University

Dr Kristian Carlson received his undergraduate BS degrees in Anthropology and Anthropology-Zoology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1994. He completed graduate degrees in Anthropology from Indiana University, Bloomington, receiving an MA in 1998, and a PhD in 2002.  From 2002 – 2005, he undertook postdoctoral research in the Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University. He also completed postdoctoral work in the Anthropologisches Institut und Museum, Universität Zürich, Switzerland from 2005 – 2006. From 2006 until 2009, he was an Assistant Professor of Anatomy in the Department of Anatomy, New York College of Osteopathic Medicine. He accepted a position as a Senior Researcher in the Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa in 2009, where he has been since. For 2010, he received a C2 researcher rating by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa.

Dr Carlson’s research focuses on understanding how limbs, acting as structures, are stressed during locomotor modes, and understanding the functional signals that locomotor activities leave in limb anatomy.  Identifying changes in limb structure during hominin evolution offers an opportunity to resolve whether the shift towards terrestrial bipedalism happened relatively quickly or more gradually, and whether fore- and hind limbs reveal similar or different functional histories. In order to achieve his research goals, Dr. Carlson studies functional morphology in mice and in our closest living ancestors, the African apes. He particularly emphasises habituated chimpanzees in his research programme, for these unique populations provide unrivalled research opportunities to study chimpanzee form and function in the context of documented habitat conditions, life history, and behavioral repertoires, often to the level of the individuals.

Dr Carlson has participated in excavations and recovery of specimens at Malapa. He also is a team member participating in the description and interpretation of hominin postcranial remains. He is responsible for directing all aspects of the Malapa hominin research specifically related to visualization and virtual-based analyses, including the use of 3D data acquisition modalities such as CT scanning and synchrotron.

Tel: 27 11 717 6681
Mobile: 27 73 666 0106
Email: Kristian.Carlson@wits.ac.za
Web: www.wits.ac.za/ihe    

Dr Dietrich Stout

Palaeoanthropologist and Neural Scientist

Affiliations:

Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Dietrich Stout is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

His interests are in multidisciplinary approaches to human cognitive and brain evolution, with a special emphasis on the archaeological record of technological development.

After receiving his PhD from Indiana University in 2003, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at The George Washington University and then as a Lecturer in Archaeology at University College London.

His past work has included archaeological analyses of the world’s earliest known stone tools, experimental studies in the cognitive neuroscience of tool use, and an ethnographic investigation of traditional stone tool-making in Highland New Guinea.

In addition to his work with the Malapa project, he currently contributes to archaeological fieldwork with the Gona Research Project in Afar, Ethiopia and is working with an interdisciplinary team of colleagues in neuroscience, archaeology and engineering to develop new methods for interpreting the archaeological and paleontological records of human cognitive evolution.

Tel: 1 404 712 1828
Email: dwstout@emory.edu
Web: www.emory.edu

Dr Paul Tafforeau 

Synchrotron Scientist

Affiliations:

European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Dr Paul Tafforeau (born in 1977 in France) is a palaeontologist. During his PhD, working on primates dental enamel microstructure and teeth 3D structure, he was the first to use X-ray synchrotron microtomography to investigate fossils.

The first experiment done in 2000 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility was so successful that he regularly came back for many experiments during his PhD. While working on fossil primate teeth, he also tested synchrotron imaging on many other kind of fossils.

After his PhD, he started in 2004 to work full time at the ESRF, first as a post-doc and now as a thematic scientist, to develop contacts between the synchrotron and the paleontologists. In parallel with his main research topic on primate teeth and hominids dental development, he works on optimizing X-ray synchrotron imaging techniques for fossils high quality non-destructive investigations. Through many impressive results obtained during several collaborations with team from everywhere in the world, paleontology is now one of the important topics at the ESRF.

Tel:                  33 4 76 882 252
Email:              paul.tafforeau@esrf.fr
Web:                www.esrf.fr

Ms Keely Carlson

Palaeoanthropology Doctoral Student

Affiliations:

Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University

Keely Carlson is a PhD student studying biological anthropology at Texas A&M University.  She is interested in the origins of the genus Homo with a central focus upon hominin craniofacial variation. 

Her doctoral research involves the application of both tradition linear morphometrics and 3D geometric morphometric techniques for the analysis of cranial shape variation among the Australopithecus and Homo genera for the purpose of better understanding the role of Au. sediba in human evolutionary history.

Ms Carlson has additionally participated in the excavation and analysis of the Matjhabeng (Pliocene) and Mimosa (Middle Stone Age) fossil localities located in the Free State province of South Africa.  Other research interests include stable isotope ecology and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction.

Tel: 1 979 845 4940
Email: keelyc@tamu.edu
Web: www.tamu.edu

Dr Tea Jashashvili

Palaeoanthropologist

Affiliations:

Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi

Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zürich, Zûrich

Dr. Tea Jashashvili is a postdoc at University of the Witwatersrand, Institute for Human Evolution under supervisory Dr. Kristian Carlson. Dr. Jashashvili received her MD Diploma of Medical Doctor of General Practice, Tbilisi State Medical University, 2001. She complete graduate degrees in Quaternary: geology, human paleontology prehistory, National Museum of Natural History, Paris, 2002 and International PhD Diploma in “Environment, Human, and Behavioral Dynamics”, University of Ferrara, 2005. She undertook postdoctoral research in the Anthropologisches Institut und Museum, Universität Zürich, Switzerland from 2006 – 2009 under supervisory Prof. Christoph P E Zollikofer.

Dr. Jashashvili’s research focuses on understanding Human Evolution, Paleoanthropology. Her interest centered on the morphological and morphometrical variations in extant hominoids and extinct hominins during the Plio-Pleistocene, locomotoral behavior analysis of postcranial, hominoid skeleton proportions.  Her current research projects are focus in eveo-devo of human evolution (growth and development in hominoid postcranial anatomy) with additional link to locomotoral behaviors.

Dr. Jashashvili is member of Dmanisi excavation team since 2002. She is also a team member of the International excavation of Tsalka Pleistocene, Georgia and Kotia’s Klde Upper Paleolithic, Western Georgia. She participates to Malapa project in analysis of endocast and upper limb remains, as well as to help Dr. Kristian Carlson visualization and virtual-based analyses.

Dr. Jashashvili was awarded Dan David Prize Scholarship for young researchers. Field: Palaeoanthropology (Dimension: Past) (2003). She published in prestigious journals, such as: Nature, the Journal of Human Evolution and the Journal of Anatomy.

Email: Tea.Jashashvili@wits.ac.za
Web: www.wits.ac.za/ihe

Dr Tracy Kivell

Affiliations:

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Dr Tracy Kivell is a palaeoanthropologist who studies the functional morphology of the primate hand. 

She is currently a researcher in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany. 

Her research focuses on living and fossil apes, including fossil hominins, to further the understanding of the origin of human bipedalism and hand use throughout human evolutionary history. She aims to understand functional anatomy of the hand through analyses of development, internal trabecular bone structure and the biomechanics of primate locomotion.

Tracy obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2007 on the developmental morphology of the ape wrist, knuckle-walking adaptations and the origin of human bipedalism.  Before going to the MPI-EVA, Tracy was a Research Associate at Duke University for two years, teaching gross anatomy at the Duke School of Medicine and working in the Animal Locomotion Lab to study pressure and force experienced by the hands during locomotion in non-human primates.

Phone: 49 (0) 341 3550 356
Email: tracy_kivell@eva.mpg.de
Web: http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/staff/kivell/index.htm

Dr Peter Schmid 

Palaeoanthropologist

Affiliations:

Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Tel: 41 44 634 44 32
Email: smidi@aim.uzh.ch
Web: www.uzhh.ch

Dr Job M Kibii

Palaeoanthropologist and lead author

Affiliations:

Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa

Dr Job Kibii is a native of Kenya and obtained his Honours degree in Archaeology and Sociology from the University of Nairobi in 1998.

He came to South Africa in 1999 and enrolled for a Masters degree at the Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwatersrand, which was awarded in 2001. He elected to pursue a PhD in the Departments of Anatomical Sciences and Archaeology, which was awarded in 2005, with him becoming the first indigenous African to obtain a PhD in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 2006, Kibii was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the University of Witwatersrand.

Dr Kibii is a product of Wits University having graduated in Masters, PhD and completed post-doctoral studies here. In 2009, he was appointed as a researcher in the Institute for Human Evolution.

On the 15^th August 2008, Dr. Kibii accompanied Prof. Lee Berger and his son Matthew to the new site of Malapa, during when the first hominid discovery at the site was made. Later, Berger and Kibii, applied for a joint permit to excavate the site. Since then, Kibii has been directing and supervising the day to day running and progress of the excavation, including supervision of the 2009 and 2010 Swiss Fieldschools at the site.

Kibii is also actively involved in the analyses of faunal remains recovered from the site including hominid postcranial material.

Tel: 27 11 717 6654
Mobile: 27 72 157 0974
Email: Job.Kibii@wits.ac.za  
Web: www.wits.ac.za/sediba    

Nichelle D Reed

Doctoral Student in Palaeoanthropology

Affiliations:

Duke University, Durham North Carolina

Nichelle Reed is a graduate student in the Evolutionary Anthropology department at Duke University. She received her undergraduate degree in anthropology at the University of South Florida in 2008. She spent a year teaching English in Anyang, South Korea before pursuing a doctorate in paleoanthropology. She was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2010. She currently lives in Durham, NC.

Dr Bernhard Zipfel

Palaeoanthropologist and Lead Author

Affiliations:

Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Bernard Price Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

Dr Zipfel is a palaeoanthroplogist with a special interest in the evolution of the human foot, the origins of hominin bipedalism and palaeopathology. He was appointed as the Curator of Collections at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007 and was formerly the Head of the Department of Podiatry at the University of Johannesburg.

In addition to the extensive fossil vertebrate, invertebrate and plant collections at Wits University’s Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research and Institute for Human Evolution, he also manages the fossil primate collections at the School of Anatomical Sciences and rock collections at the School of Geosciences.

Bernhard obtained his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2005 on the morphological variation of foot bones in recent and ancient humans. He is currently the Vice-President of the Palaeontological Society of South Africa and has been honoured as a Lifetime Member of the South African Podiatry Association. In addition to his work on hominin fossil feet, he is also interested in the effects of modern lifestyle on the morphological and pathological variation of the human foot, conservation of natural history collections, particularly fossils and comparative fauna, and podiatric medicine.

Tel: 27 11 717 6683
Mobile: 27 11 83 779 3394
Email: Bernhard.Zipfel@wits.ac.za  
Web: www.wits.ac.za/ihe     

Prof. Jeremy DeSilva          

Palaeoanthropologist and Locomotor Specialist

Affiliations:

Department of Anthropology, Boston University

Jeremy De Silva is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University in Massachusetts, USA. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2008, and specialises in the functional morphology of the foot and ankle in early human ancestors.

Tel:                  1 617 353 5026
Email:              jdesilva@bu.edu
Web:                www.boston.edu 

Prof. Robert Kidd

Palaeoanthropologist and Foot Morphology Specialist

Affiliations:

School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, University of Western Sydney

The Institute for Human Evolution, University of the Witwatersrand

Dr Robert Kidd’s academic career started in Manchester in 1980 when he joined the staff at what is now The University of Salford. In 1987 he moved to what is now The University of Northampton. He left the United Kingdom in 1990 to join the staff of Curtin University in Western Australia. He arrived at University of Western Sydney (UWS) in late 1995. In all these positions he taught the anatomical and anthropological components of Podiatric Medicine. He is now in the School of Biomedical and Health Sciences teaching anatomy exclusively.

Tel: 61 (0) 2 4620 3633
Email: robertkidd5@bigpond.com
Web: www.uws.edu.au

Institute for Human Evolution

Laboratory Staff

Ms Bonita de Klerk

Ms Bonita de Klerk is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University.  Her masters research focused on the effects that hybridisation has had on Black Wildebeest evolution.

She has focused on human body size variation with specific reference to a small bodied population of fossil Homo sapiens from Palau, Micronesia for her PhD research.  

She is currently the Laboratory Manager for the Malapa Project where she manages the preparation, casting and curation aspects of the project. She is actively involved in science communication and outreach and often presents public talks relating to the Cradle of Humankind and Evolution.

Tel:                  27 11 717 6696
Email:              bonita.deklerk@wits.ac.za
Web:                www.wits.ac.za/ihe

PREPARATORS, CASTERS AND EXCAVATORS

The biographies and images of all co-authors can be downloaded from www.wits.ac.za/ihe or can be requested from Shirona.Patel@wits.ac.za or call 27 11 717 1019.