About FOOTSTEP
The human skeleton undergoes constant remodelling over the lifetime of the individual. Major transitions in human evolution can be seen in many aspects of our postcranial skeleton. The transition from the arboreal environment of our ancestors to become terrestrial bipeds can be seen in our highly specialised foot. The EU-funded FOOTSTEP project will explore locomotor evolution in the human lineage. Specifically, it will study the internal bone structure of the foot of extant non human great apes and humans from a range of populations. Using a cutting-edge geometric morphometric approach, it will analyse the internal bone structure of all tarsals and metatarsals of Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, Australopithecus sediba, Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis and the Olduvai Hominid 8 foot (Homo habilis/Paranthropus).
The project is conducted in collaboration with Prof. Matthew Skinner, Prof. Tracy Kivell and the NewHuman project. More information about FOOTSTEP can be found here.
About Zewdi J. Tsegai
I am a palaeoanthropologist, currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Kent (UK) on the FOOTSTEP project. I am primarily interested in understanding the evolution of bipedalism and reconstructing locomotion among early human ancestors.
My research focuses on understanding how behaviour shapes the skeleton, and how we can use plastic features to reconstruct the locomotor behaviour of our fossil ancestors. I specialise in analysis of high resolution micro-CT scans.
I was awarded my PhD in 2018 from Leipzig University, and completed postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany).