Come meet Tegid Watkin and talk to him about his research! Tegid is a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. He is interested in how the human hand, as an appendage originally used for locomotion, adapted to making and using stone tools. Making and using stone tools was once thought to be a defining characteristic of the genus to which we belong, Homo. However, recent archaeological and paleontological discoveries, along with observations of non-human primates in the wild, cast doubt on this assumption. Tegid’s research aims to shed light on which hominin species were able to manufacture and use early stone tools in our evolutionary past. He does this by creating virtual 3-dimensional models of the hand bones of modern humans, fossil hominin species, and living non-human primates in order to compare shape variation in the bones, which in turn provides information on the dexterity of our distant ancestors.

The Scientist Is In program provides opportunities for museum visitors to have informal conversations with scientists, and is not a formal lecture program. Drop in and join the conversation.