PhD candidate Alyssa Enny awarded NSF doctoral dissertation grant

Alyssa Enny’s dissertation research titled “The Role of Aquatic Resources in Human Development” will examine the dietary strategies of early hominins. She will examine aquatic remains collected from sites in Koobi Fora, Kenya, spanning 1.25 million years to assess how different hominin populations utilized these resources. Could different dietary strategies explain why some hominin species lived for hundreds of thousands of years while others lived for briefer periods? Previous research on ancient human diets reveals close linkages between broad dietary strategies and species resilience, suggesting that diet played a key role in the survival of some early human ancestors and, ultimately, the evolutionary success of modern humans. However, few of these studies focus on aquatic animals, like fish and turtles, despite important nutrients in aquatic fauna and evidence that ancient hominins lived close to water sources.  By combining targeted aquatic fauna fossil collections with thorough sampling methods designed to recover small remains, this project will generate a comprehensive fossil dataset that enables nuanced interpretations of the faunal fossil record and human diet.