Nina Jablonski

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Nina Jablonski (2014)

Nina Grace Jablonski (born August 20, 1953 ) is an American paleoanthropologist . She has been Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University since 2006 . In particular, she researches the evolution of baboons and humans . She became internationally known primarily because of her studies and publications on the evolution of human skin colors .

Life

Nina Jablonski grew up on a farm in western New York State . As far as she remembers, she was inspired to study biology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania mainly by a television program by the National Geographic Society , by Louis Leakey's research in the East African Olduvai Gorge in the mid-1960s, and especially by the discovery of the then Zinjanthropus boisei called "nutcracker people" were introduced. Nonetheless, her focus in her basic studies was initially in the area of ​​the then rapidly developing subject of molecular biology .

With the aim of combining topics from the burgeoning, new field of molecular evolution with anthropology, Nina Jablonski - after she had passed the Bachelor of Arts examination in biology in 1975 - at the University of Washington to study anthropology (Master Graduation 1978) and to do a doctorate in this subject. During her main course, however, her interest in the connection between paleontology and comparative anatomy was aroused. Based on these interests, she wrote her doctoral thesis in 1981 with the title Functional Analysis of the Masticatory Apparatus of Theropithecus gelada (Primates: Cercopithecidae) , in which she examined the chewing apparatus of the jelada , a close relative of baboons that is very rare today; the jeladas are the last surviving species of a species-rich group of large African primates that was successful in the Pliocene and Pleistocene .

During her doctoral studies, Nina Jablonski had already worked in the large collection of jeladas in the anatomy department of the University of Hong Kong . After completing her doctoral thesis, she worked as a lecturer at the same institute from 1981 to 1990 - with the result that she has mastered standard Chinese, both spoken and written, and was quickly able to establish permanent contacts with researchers in the People's Republic of China , especially the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . The focus of her research during this time was the evolution of the snub-nosed monkeys of East Asia, examining the anatomy of the species living today as well as the anatomy of their fossil-based ancestors and combining paleontological findings with paleo-ecological findings. In this way it could be proven that geologically and geobotanically documented changes in the environment can lead to anatomical changes and to changes in species diversity.

In 1990 Nina Jablonski moved to the University of Western Australia as a Senior Lecturer , where she held lectures on human evolution in the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology . Then, in addition to her studies on Old World monkeys, she also dealt with the development of the upright gait and - beginning in 1991 - with the causes and consequences of the development of different skin colors in humans. In 1994 she went back to the USA, to a chair at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco , where she headed the department of anthropology from 1998 to 2006. Since 2006 she has been a professor at Pennsylvania State University in State College .

Nina Jablonski is married to the biogeographer George Chaplin, who is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University.

research

Nina Jablonski during a lecture at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center 2017

Nina Jablonski is engaged in several research topics at Pennsylvania State University, as she has done elsewhere before. This includes the evolution of the Old World monkeys and in particular the evolution of the hominini ; also the evolution of the bipedia and skin color in the ancestors of recent humans; and finally the changes in the environment and the associated evolution of a late Miocene primate fauna community in southern China.

Since 1991 she has been analyzing the causes of the considerable changes in the body surface of the hominini in the course of their tribal history, i.e. the changes in the skin, hair and especially skin pigmentation . Her research results, summarized in two books, say, among other things, that skin color is inherited independently of all other externally recognizable human characteristics. Therefore, the skin color is not a suitable characteristic for classifying human populations into races based on skin color. Rather, the skin color is a multiple and independent adaptation to regionally different UV radiation from the sun.

For example, parallel to the loss of the dense fur in the early ancestors of anatomically modern humans in Africa, pigmentation increased, since too intense sunlight destroys the folic acid in the body, which could lead to the birth of misdeveloped offspring. In the course of the spread of humans into northern Eurasia , the significantly lower UV-B radiation there led to the pigmentation of the skin being reduced again; otherwise the dark pigment melanin would have weakened the effectiveness of UV-B radiation so much that insufficiently large amounts of vitamin D would have been formed in the skin; Vitamin D deficiency, however, leads to rickets , among other things .

In addition to her scientific work, Nina Jablonski is committed to spreading knowledge about human evolution to scientific laypeople.

Honors

Fonts

  • Our unknown skin. In: Regina Oehler, Petra Gehring , Volker Mosbrugger (eds.): Biology and Ethics: Life as a Project. E. Schweizerbart´sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 20–29. ISBN 978-3-510-61409-7 ; Series: Senckenberg Books, No. 78.
  • Seen from the outside, man is a stray. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 21 of January 25, 2017, p. N2
  • Skin: why we are naked. In: Brain & Mind . No. 5/2013, pp. 22-29, full text
  • Why people are naked. In: Spectrum of Science . No. 10/2010, pp. 60-67
  • with George Chaplin: The Evolution of Skin Color. In: Spectrum of Science. June 2003, pp. 38-44

Books

  • Skin: a Natural History. University of California Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-520-24281-4
  • Living Color. The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color. The University of California Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-520-25153-3
  • Race. In: John Brockman (Ed.): Which Scientific Idea is Ripe for Retirement? The leading minds of our time about ideas that prevent us from making progress. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2016, pp. 112–115, ISBN 978-3-596-03395-9

Professional article (selection)

  • with Sally McBrearty: First fossil chimpanzee. In: Nature . Volume 437, 2005, pp. 105-108, doi: 10.1038 / nature04008
  • with George Chaplin: Human skin pigmentation as an adaptation to UV radiation. In: PNAS . Volume 107, Supplement 2, pp. 8962-8968, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0914628107
  • with George Chaplin: Human skin pigmentation, migration and disease susceptibility. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Volume 367, 2012, pp. 785-792, doi: 10.1098 / rstb.2011.0308

literature

Web links

Commons : Nina Jablonski  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Pennsylvania State University, Nina Jablonski's website
  2. ^ Curriculum vitae on the website of the Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology
  3. ↑ Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin: The evolution of human skin coloration. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 39, 2000, pp. 57–106, doi: 10.1006 / jhev.2000.0403 , full text (PDF)
  4. ↑ Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin: Skin cancer was not a potent selective force in the evolution of protective pigmentation in early hominins. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Volume 281, No. 1789, 2014, doi: 10.1098 / rspb.2014.0517
  5. ↑ Ann Gibbons: Shedding light in skin color. Nina Jablonski explores how it evolved. In: Science . Volume 346, No. 6212, 2014, pp. 934-936, doi: 10.1126 / science.346.6212.934
personal data
SURNAME Jablonski, Nina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jablonski, Nina Grace
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th August 1953