Biography
I gained my BSc in Zoology from the University of Exeter in 2016, with a focus on the ecological interactions between humans and wildlife. I then moved into rural development work in Sub-Saharan Africa, working for organisations like the UNFAO and others in Mozambique, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
I returned to complete my MSc in Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford, focussing on human-environment interactions in the Palaeolithic, completing my thesis on the landscape ecology of Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers around the important site of Border Cave in South Africa.
I have excavated early human sites in the UK, at Taforalt Cave in Morocco and at Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Research
My research interests are in the palaeoecology of Pleistocene hominins in both Africa and Western Eurasia, and how these changed according to environmental fluctuations.
My PhD research focuses on the palaeoecology of Neanderthals from Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan. Shanidar Cave is one of the most iconic Neanderthal sites in the world, having yielded at least 10 individuals in the 1950s. A new project led by Professor Graeme Barker aims to reinvestigate the cave with modern archaeological science methods.
I aim to contribute by analysing dental isotopes from both Neanderthals and their ibex prey to build an ecological model for how and where in the landscape Neanderthals sourced their food, and how this changed over time. We aim to reconstruct how Neanderthals adapted to environmental changes, in a region where they are little-understood, and reveal long-term responses of south-west Asian fauna to climatic changes, using past fluctuations as a natural experiment.
Teaching and Supervisions
I am involved in supervising the following courses:
Paper B1: Humans in Biological Perspective
Primary supervisor: Dr. Emma Pomeroy
Advisor: Dr. Tamsin O’Connell
