Member Profile
Bernard Wood
Plant Microfossils in dental calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets
A team consisting of IGERT trainee Amanda Henry, and IGERT faculty members Alison Brooks and Dolores Piperno discovered that microfossils of starches from food are preserved for more than 100,000 years in... More »
About Me
When he was still a medical student, Bernard Wood joined Richard Leakey’s first expedition to what was then Lake Rudolf in 1968, and he has remained associated with that research group, and pursued research in paleoanthropology, ever since. His primary interests are directed towards developing a better understanding the evolution of the human lineage, or clade. He is interested in the hominins themselves, their adaptations and in the processes and factors that shaped their evolution.
Recent research has been directed towards a) evaluating and improving methods of phylogenetic analysis; b) improving our understanding of the relationships between dental structure and function; c) exploring the role of sexual dimorphism and allometry in determining the nature of morphological differences within and between species; d) tracing the evolution of tooth macrostructure and microstructure within the hominin clade; and e) identifying adaptive shifts within the hominin clade.
Current research projects focus on bioinformatics. They include the preparation of a comprehensive database of fossil hominins including conventional and 3D data, a systematic analysis of higher primate soft and hard tissue morphology that includes data about both presence/absence of features and the extent of intraspecific variation, a study of the nature, and relative contributions, of geographical variation and sex-associated differences to intraspecific variation in the living hominoids. Other projects focus on the use of special imaging techniques that will allow dental macrostructure and microstructure to be used to test phylogenetic hypotheses, and an analysis of the tempo and mode of evolutionary change in early hominins.
