Project Grant 2204135

This two-year, $286,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program will support research investigating the importance of bone marrow consumption in human evolution. Specifically, the grant will fund an early career scientist to conduct independent research under the sponsorship of Colorado State University analyzing bone breakage patterns from modern animal bone collections and zooarchaeological samples. Using new 3D scanning and machine learning technologies, the researcher will test the hypothesis that early humans began exploiting large animal food resources by scavenging for nutrients within bones, breaking them primarily to access marrow. If supported, this would indicate that the emergence of the genus Homo must be interpreted in the context of scavenging for in-bone nutrients as a precursor to the uniquely human predatory pattern of hunting animals of equal or larger size. In addition to advancing understanding of human evolution and carnivore interactions between 3.6-0.9 million years ago, the project aims to develop new methods for extracting data from 3D models to enable machine learning applications across archaeology and paleontology. An extensive open-access database of 3D models and datasets will also be created to facilitate future research.