Sabrina Curran, Ph.D.

Curran is a biological anthropologist with a specialization in paleoanthropology and paleoecology. Her research focuses on reconstructing the environments that our ancestors lived in and assessing how sites are formed. She is particularly interested in the earliest dispersals of Homo erectus into Eurasia and is the co-PI of a research project in south-central Romania (Oltet River Valley) and has worked on sites in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Georgia (the country).

The primary method Curran uses to reconstruct environments is ecomorphology, or the study of the relationship between an organism’s shape and its ecology. In particular, she uses a technique called geometric morphometrics to analyze the 3D shape of various skeletal elements of artiodactyls (hooved animals) to examine how the bones are shaped and what that tells us about how they move. Taking that knowledge, she can then look at the fossil and create a hypothesis about what kinds of habitats those artiodactyls lived in.

Curran also observes how animals’ teeth wear over their lifetimes (mesowear analysis), and compares the community of species at the site to modern communities (community analysis). According to Curran, all of these different methods used together provide a more nuanced idea of what the environments of the past looked like.

She is also involved in taphonomic analysis, which is the study of how all of the organisms at a site came to be there and is especially interested in looking at modifications to bone surfaces, as they can tell us which organisms interacted with remains, including rodents, carnivores, and even hominins (human ancestors).

Curran works with a team of specialists from all over the world, including paleontologists, geologists, and other anthropologists from the US, Romania, Sweden, Moldova, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the UK, and Australia.