Fossil Apes and Human Evolution

Bio:

Kelsey Pugh is Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She has been at the AMNH since 2020 after earning her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York as part of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP). Kelsey is a paleoanthropologist that studies the evolution of catarrhine primates (hominoids, cercopithecoid monkeys, and their extinct relatives) using phylogenetic and morphometric methods and morphological data drawn from the dentition, skull, and postcranial skeleton. She is particularly interested in apes and early hominins, and how the ape fossil record can inform the early stages of human evolution. 

Abstract:

Living hominoids (apes and humans) represent the remnants of what was once a diverse and broadly distributed clade. Comparisons of fossil apes from the Miocene to extant apes reveal many differences in, for instance, posture, locomotion, and patterns of sexual dimorphism. Compounded by the fragmentary nature of the fossil record, these differences have complicated studies of hominoid evolution and made it difficult to resolve how fossil apes are related to one another and to living apes. A clearer understanding of phylogenetic relationships is necessary to better comprehend other important aspects of ape and human evolution, including morphological transitions, ancestral morphotypes, and the biogeography of the clade. This talk will explore several lines of work aimed at gaining a better understanding of the relationships of fossil apes using cladistic, morphometric, and virtual reconstruction methods, the implications of these relationships for events in hominoid evolution, and the importance of fossil apes in understanding the origins of the human lineage.