Matthew Van Schalkwyk

My research interests have always been broadly palaeoanthropological. At this point in time, I am interested in Middle Pleistocene hominin diversification, particularly the origin and subsequent dispersals of the Homo sapiens lineage. My undergraduate honors thesis at UC San Diego focused on the Levantine Early Bronze Age as I performed a lithic analysis of ~7500 stone tools from a site in Jordan. My MPhil dissertation moved away from stone tools. It focused on australopithecine diversity, and used a combination of archaeological data, modern day environmental data, and GIS techniques to attempt to identify environmental corridors, barriers, and refugia that would have affected australopithecines dispersals between ~4 Ma and ~1 Ma. My PhD will focus on the palaeoecology of African sites since 1 million years ago in order to clarify the evolutionary context of Homo sapiens.