At LAD, everybody is into people; where they came from, how they live in different societies around the world and how they interact with their environment. So of course we were there too.
London Anthropology Day is an annual university taster day for Year 12 students, as well as undergraduate or graduate students interested in Masters’ degrees, organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute and held at The Clore Centre for Education in Bloomsbury.
Attendees came from across the UK and the University of Kent was represented this year by Lecturers Dr Chris Dunmore, and Dr Natalie Morningstar with student Abi Shortland.
Chris Dunmore’s workshop ‘Dextrous Digits, how 5 million years of evolution shaped our extraordinary human hands’ (a concise history of fingers with the help of some funky props) was a hands-down highlight!
The modern human hand is one of the defining anatomical characteristics of our species – empowering us to make and use tools that helped set us on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.
Participants were invited to wear specially made gloves which lengthened their fingers by several centimetres, so that they could feel what it was like to manipulate objects like an orangutan. In fact, they had a race to see who could put the most walnuts in a bowl fastest!
‘It changes what you’re capable of doing.’ Dunmore told us ‘We asked a couple of volunteers to see who could move several nuts into a bowl the quickest -a very visual way of showing how manipulative ability is impeded by the greater finger length.’
‘I asked everybody to match a range of (plastic) skulls to hands, we had an orangutan and modern human, well as several fossil species that are snapshots of our evolutionary history, including: Australopithecus sediba and Ardipithecus ramidus, and a Neanderthal. , essentially by the end of the workshop everyone had a primer on ‘How to be a paleoanthropologist’.
‘It was a really fun day. I love meeting students and hearing their fresh takes, it re-energises and re-enthuses me and reminds me why I do what I do.’
Student Abbie Shortland shows you around LAD, watch here.