In Africa, the Plio-Pleistocene hominin fossil record is represented by a diversity of species within the genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo. In some cases, these species overlapped in time and space. This project will involve extraction of ancient protein remains from Plio-Pleistocene hominin dental enamel specimens from Africa. This will be followed by reconstruction of the hominin dental enamel protein sequences and comparison to the homologous sequences from modern and extinct hominin species to infer their phylogenetic position in the hominin tree. Such an achievement will represent a breakthrough in biomolecular-based hominin phylogeny as both ancient DNA and ancient skeletal proteins are generally considered challenging to retrieve from the Early Pleistocene African hominin fossil record. Finally, ancient protein analysis can also be used to determine the sex of fossil mammalian teeth and consequently to distinguish whether their morphological variation derives from either sexual dimorphism or taxonomic diversity.
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