Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo

Modern Human Cranial Variation:

An Evolutionary Morphology Approach

EvoS Seminar
Monday, 5:15 PM, S1-149
February 17, 2020 

About the seminar

One of the central questions in the study of archaeological or fossil morphological remains is the extent to
which skeletal shape can act as a reliable proxy for underlying genetic information regarding patterns of
relatedness amongst taxa. While it is widely assumed in biological anthropology that the shape of the
cranium is a reasonably accurate reflection of taxonomy and phylogeny, studies of living primates have
found inconsistencies in how well different aspects of cranial shape actually track evolutionary history.
Here, I explore this issue in the context of globally-distributed human populations by testing how well
different cranial regions reflect known genetic relationships, and how the cranium might also be impacted
by confounding factors related to diet or climate. Generally, the results show that the shape of the human
cranium does reflect global patterns of population history to a large extent, leaving open the possibility to
use cranial data to test hypotheses of relatedness in bioarchaeological contexts where genetic data are
unavailable.

About the speaker

Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo
with a research focus on evolutionary morphology. She began her academic journey in Ireland as a
zoology student working on body shape variation in salmon. However, she decided that she really wanted
to pursue graduate research in human evolution, so moved to London to undertake a master’s degree in
biological anthropology at UCL. Here she got involved in genetics research, which gave her a solid
appreciation of microevolutionary theory and population biology. However, her real passion was
morphometrics – or the measurement of shape – so she focused her PhD research at the University of
Cambridge on the quantification of human cranial variation in the context of global population history.
From 2008-2014, she worked in the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent,
after which she moved across the Atlantic to join the faculty at the anthropology department in Buffalo.
Here, she established the Buffalo Human Evolutionary Morphology lab, which includes postdocs,
graduate and undergraduate students working on various projects related to the evolution of primate
skeletal variation.

All are welcome. For more information, contact Dr. Rolf Quam, EvoS Director, rquam (@) binghamton.edu, or Susan Ryan, EvoS Coordinator, sryan (@) binghamton.edu