Exploring the Past
Brian Richmond probes human evolution through new technology.
By Ari Kaplan
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Photos by Jessica McConnell
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A few years ago, researchers conducting an archaeological
dig in a remote corner of Kenya stumbled across some fossil
human hand bones. The first person they called was Brian Richmond,
associate professor in GW’s Center for the Advanced
Study of Hominid Paleobiology and specialist in the evolution
of the hand.
Richmond and his team traveled to Kenya, where they found
other hand and arm bones from the same individual. The fossils
were discovered in sediments indicating they were more than
1.5 million years old. “It’s an incredibly rare
discovery,” says Richmond. “The vast majority
of fossils found from that era belong to animals, and the
rare hominin fossils that have been found are almost always
isolated bones or teeth. It’s very unusual to find so
much of an individual appendage, and it’s extremely
important for understanding the evolutionary history of manual
manipulation and dexterity.”
Richmond’s expertise is not limited to hands, however;
he also studies functional anatomy, especially the origins
of the human gait, how the skeleton is shaped, and how its
shape relates to function. His research, he explains, aims
to infer behavior from skeletal structure in the human fossil
record, focusing on the early evolutionary history of humans—the
era ranging from 5 million to 7 million years ago when the
ancestors of humans and chimpanzees took separate paths with
humans’ predecessors taking the first steps to becoming
upright walkers.
Richmond’s research also examines another crucial era
in evolution—from 1.5 million to 3 million years ago—when
primitive “australopiths” evolved to a dramatically
more human-like Homo erectus with a much larger brain and
a body shape and size similar to that of today’s humans.
The era marks the beginning of stone tool use and animal butchery,
a shift in diet, and a move to grassland environments.
A Passion for Human Evolution
This Neanderthal unearthed at Amud Cave, Israel, showed
evidence of sophisticated behavior and had a brain size
comparable to our own.
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Richmond’s road to Foggy Bottom came by way of Rice
University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology
and history in 1990. Richmond had planned to be a doctor,
but anthropology classes and neurobiology thesis research
during his senior year in college changed his mind. “I
loved putting together a project, identifying a question no
one has answered, and going out and doing the work,”
he says.
After that, he was hooked. Following graduation, he shelved
his plans for medical school, and instead spent two semesters
studying anthropology at GW. “It was the right combination
of biology, human origins, and anatomy for me,” Richmond
says.
After receiving a PhD in anthropology in 1998 from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, Richmond returned to
GW for two years as the Henry R. Luce postdoctoral fellow
in the University’s then-brand-new Human Origins Initiative.
Following a stint as an assistant professor of anthropology
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Richmond
returned to GW in 2002.
One of his first assignments as a faculty member at GW was
to assist the Department of Anthropology in creating a bachelor’s
degree in biological anthropology. Four years later, GW has
more than 40 students majoring and minoring in biological
anthropology and has doubled its offering of upper-level undergraduate
courses in the field.
Richmond teaches a number of these courses, as well as an
introductory class on the biological bases of human behavior
and graduate courses in human evolution, functional anatomy,
and analytical methods. In addition to his work in the classroom,
he has brought undergraduate researchers into his laboratory,
mentoring six undergraduate theses since arriving at GW.
He also teaches classes, advises students, and helps obtain
external funding for GW’s Hominid Paleobiology Doctoral
Program, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to training
students in human origins. Richmond explains that GW doctoral
students in the program study geology, anatomy, engineering,
and microbiology to better prepare them to conduct cutting-edge
research and understand the whole picture of evolution.
Tapping New Technology
While Richmond’s research has taken him around the
globe, including expeditions to Ethiopia, Turkey, and Kenya,
much of his work occurs on campus and at the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of Natural History, thanks to new imaging
technology. “Improvements in technology allow us to
ask and answer increasingly sophisticated questions,”
Richmond says.
In research funded by the National Science Foundation, Richmond
is examining the bone found inside joints, described as “spongy”
because the plates and struts within it are connected much
like a stiff sponge. Since this bone is a living tissue and
is greatly influenced by individual activities and exercise,
it provides important clues to human ancestors’ actions
and behaviors when they were living.
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These are casts of skulls of an extinct group of human
relatives that lived in Africa 1 to 2 million years
ago.
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Taking advantage of recent advances in CT technology, which
can provide high-resolution three-dimensional images of this
bone structure, Richmond compares fossils and living tissue
to draw inferences about human evolution. “This technology
provides evidence about what an individual was doing while
he or she was alive and, more broadly, about the origins of
the human gait and the human skeleton,” he says. Richmond
also uses software developed by collaborators at the University
of Texas that enables him to quantify the differences between
species.
In another research project funded by the NSF, Richmond is
examining the evolution of craniofacial biomechanics, including
how the skull has adapted for chewing. “It’s clear
from the fossil record that some species have adaptations
for powerful chewing,” he says.
According to Richmond, until relatively recently, there have
been limited means of testing theories about the evolution
of the skull. By applying finite element analysis—a
computer modeling technique used widely in engineering but
new to anthropology— Richmond and his team model the
biomechanics of biting and chewing in modern monkeys and our
extinct ancestors to test hypotheses about human evolution.
These models are built in part on data collected using biomedical
technology to measure muscle activity in live monkeys. These
kinds of comparisons are the only way to study the biomechanics
of fossil species—in effect, the next best thing to
examining fossils in actual motion, says Richmond.
Next year, after returning from further excavations in Kenya,
Richmond will take a sabbatical and work with the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of Natural History, where he currently serves
as a research associate with the Human Origins Program. There,
he will finish analyses and articles reporting the results
of his myriad projects. His efforts at the Smithsonian also
will focus on collecting measurements and CT scans of the
arm and hand skeletons of humans, apes, and other primates
to uncover the ways in which the 1.5 million-year-old fossil
arm and hand bones are like modern humans, and the ways in
which they may be primitive or unique.
“It is a surreal feeling to pick up a stone tool or
a fossil of one of our ancestors, to think this individual
was born, lived, and died 1.5 million years ago,” Richmond
says. “I love my job and wouldn’t give it up for
any other.”
For more information, visit Brian Richmond’s Web
site: http://home.gwu.edu/~brich
Ari Kaplan, JD ’97, is an attorney and freelance
writer based in the New York City area.
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