Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Sandi Copeland

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Alumni Spotlight: '96) By Office of Career + Alumni Services Sandi Copeland is an anthropologist and adjunct faculty member at RMCAD specializing in the study of human evolution in Africa. Her research investigates early hominin (human ancestor) interactions with plants, animals, climate, and other aspects of the environment at sites in South Africa and Tanzania. Her latest research, published in the June 2, 2011 issue of the journal Nature, uses strontium isotopes (87Sr/86Sr) to investigate landscape use of hominins and other animals. Strontium isotope ratios differ between bedrock types, and the unique strontium isotope ratio of a particular bedrock passes into the soils, plants, and animals that feed in that area. By measuring strontium isotope ratios in teeth, one can identify the bedrock source and therefore the approximate location in which an animal grew up. Dr. Copeland led a team of researchers who studied fossil teeth from 2 million-year-old extinct early hominin species, Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus bosei, from two adjacent cave systems in South Africa. These distant human ancestors walked upright like modern humans, but had brains only slightly larger than those of a chimpanzee. Her team found that more than half of the female hominins did not grow up in the vicinity of the cave sites in which they eventually died. In contrast, about 90% of the male hominins probably grew up and died in the same area. This indicates that these early human ancestors had a social structure in which males remained in their home territory for life, while females, upon maturity, left home and joined new communities. The study was a landmark for anthropology because it provides the first direct evidence giving a glimpse of the social structure of these early hominins.

Career + Alumni Services (CAS): When did your findings begin to click for you and your team? What was that feeling like for you? Sandi Copeland (SC): We were measuring the strontium isotope ratios of each precious fossil hominin tooth in an African Earth Observatory Network (AEON) lab at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The curator of the museum where the teeth are stored in Pretoria had made the 2-hour plane trip to personally bring us the specimens and watch over them during our analysis. As the numbers began rolling out of the machine, we were at first disappointed because so many of the individuals showed “local” values indicating that they’d grown up right around the cave where they died. We had expected that these early humans moved around a lot. But by the time we were measuring the ninth tooth, we realized that an exciting trend was developing. The small, female teeth showed a pattern of being nonlocal while the large, male teeth were consistently local. We had hypothesized that there might be differences in males and females, but we were stunned to see the results appearing before our eyes showing a pattern of female dispersal! In most primates, the males are the ones that leave their home group upon reaching maturity, because either one sex or some of both must eventually leave in order to avoid inbreeding. In our closest relatives the chimpanzees and gorillas, the females are typically the ones to disperse. The reason that chimpanzee females leave is because the males of the group stay and, with their brothers, cousins, and fathers, actively defend their territory against neighboring chimpanzee communities. A similar behavioral pattern could account for the pattern of female, not male, dispersal in the early hominins.

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CAS: How were you able to obtain the resources needed for your research? SC: I began undertaking this research when I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. The study was funded in part by a federal grant from the Archaeology and Physical Anthropology branches of the National Science Foundation. I then continued the research when I was hired as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I used the sophisticated laboratory equipment in Germany to analyze over 160 plants and animals that we collected within a 30 mile radius of the fossil sites in South Africa in order to obtain the background strontium isotope values characteristic of each type of bedrock.

CAS: What does anthropology and the research surrounding it provide to our current society? SC: The study of anthropology is incredibly relevant to the modern world because of the extent to which people come into contact with people from cultural backgrounds different to their own. An understanding of our evolutionary history helps us understand the close genetic relationship of all modern humans, despite the tendency to classify people into a particular “race.” It also gives a great insight into a deep time perspective of our species. Contrary to popular opinion, during about 90% of the time that modern Homo sapiens have existed (about 200,000 years) they lived as mobile hunter-gatherers with few possessions and an egalitarian society, not as sedentary farmers with chiefs or kings. Farming, cities, and big civilizations are a very recent phenomenon in human history, invented only in the past 11,000 years. Exciting new finds in anthropology show that art and symbolic behavior, as expressed by shell beads and ochre used for painting, for example, have probably been around for at least 100,000 years.

CAS: In teaching a humanities course, where you blend both research and academia, what would you like your students to take away from the course? SC: I have taught both Biological Anthropology and Human Ecology at RMCAD. Teaching these humanities courses is very satisfying because I feel like I am imparting information to the students that will be relevant throughout their whole lives. I am directly contributing to their liberal arts education, which is a foundation that is difficult to quantify, but is nonetheless readily apparent in an individual who has been fortunate enough to experience it. I want my students to come away from my courses with an understanding that humans are part of – not separate from - the ecosystems of the world, and that humans are a product of evolution just like all other life on Earth. I hope that such a perspective will help students appreciate things like cultural traditions, conserving natural resources and the environment, and respecting other cultures and other living things.

CAS: What have you enjoyed most about traveling to a particular region? Do you have a favorite? Why? SC: Most of my research has been conducted in the East African country of Tanzania and in South Africa. My time spent in Tanzania was probably the most enjoyable because I lived in the Serengeti for 6 months as a researcher with permission to travel freely within the huge park, including in areas off-road that are not allowed for tourists. From my Land Cruiser, I watched thousands of wildebeest, zebra, and other antelope grazing on fresh grass growth that sprouted from the spring monsoon rains. I observed many lions, cheetah, leopards, hyenas, and vultures consuming the bodies of unlucky antelopes. I got to know some of the Swahili language and to interact with the generous people of Tanzania, many of whom are unemployed but are trying so hard to find an opportunity to pay for school or obtain employment.