Dr Christopher Dunmore is a Palaeobiologist focussed on human evolution. He is currently working on reconstructing fossil hominin hand use during locomotion and manipulation, as well as the emergence of tool-use in our lineage.
Dr Dunmore completed his PhD at the University of Kent in 2019, which was focused on linking internal bone morphology with the hand-use in living great apes, in order to infer habitual hand-use in Australopithecus sediba for the first time. He spent four years as a Lecturer in Biological Anthropology, and is now a Lecturer in Animal Biology, as well as the Director of the Imaging Centre for Life Sciences. Dr Dunmore is developing his research on the functional morphology of the hand with other aspects of hominin post-crania, in order to reconstruct the adaptive niche of the earliest members of our genus, Homo.
Dr Dunmore's research interest in the functional morphology extends to all elements of the post-cranial skeleton in extant and extinct vertebrates, though his focus is the hands of fossil hominins. He is particularly interested in the ability of internal bone architecture to change during life to better cope with mechanical loads. These internal structures record the habitual movements of fossil species and allow for the reconstruction of body movements in fossil species.
In order to access this internal morphology, Dr Dunmore uses micro computed-tomographic scans of fossil and extant bones. He has a keen interest in modern image-processing techniques, and has developed machine learning algorithms for this purpose. Dr Dunmore frequently contextualises inferred fossil behaviour within the morphology of living great ape species with observable behaviours. Exciting new methodological developments in analysing 3D structures, as well as bone biology and cellular processes, are also new developing strands in his work.
Dr Christopher Dunmore is a member of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) and the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE).
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