Dr Curran’s current research is concerned with elucidating the ecological context in which hominins evolved. Understanding the selection pressures that acted on our hominin ancestors is imperative to building and testing hypotheses relating to important questions in studies of human evolution, such as what influenced the evolution of bipedality, large brains, and the initiation of stone tool use. In order to reconstruct past habitats, she analyzes the bones of artiodactyls, such as deer and antelope, from fossil sites. She quantifies variation in joint surfaces and features across the appendicular (limb) skeleton with three-dimensional scans and geometric morphometrics. Variations in appendicular morphology are often associated with adaptations to locomotion in specific habitats and thus by understanding how artiodactyls moved in life, she can reconstruct the type of habitat in which they (and hominins) lived.
Her research interests are more broadly defined. Questions regarding how and why skeletal morphology varies interests her in general. She is currently involved with the analysis of the artiodactyl fauna from Rusinga Island, an important Miocene primate site in Kenya. She is also continuing to expand her paleoecological analyses of Plio-Pleistocene hominin (and non-hominin) sites from across the range of Homo erectus in order to understand what role the environment may have played in the first dispersal of hominins out of Africa. Her future research goals include collaborations with other paleoecological researchers in order to provide even more precision in habitat reconstructions, expanding her research to include more skeletal elements and non-human taxa, and further exploring the application of three-dimensional analyses to questions regarding human variation. |
