Timothy Bromage

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UR 501 (original), the second oldest known fossil of the genus Homo

Timothy George Bromage (born January 1954 ) is an American paleoanthropologist and since 2004 Professor in the Department of Biomaterials and Biomimetics at the College of Dentistry at New York University .

Together with his German colleague Friedemann Schrenk , he has been leading the hominid corridor project in Malawi since 1983 , which opened up numerous new Pliocene and Pleistocene fossil sites in the area of ​​the Malawi Rift, in particular, up to five million years old . The most important fossil discovered by his research group is a lower jaw recovered in 1991 with the archive number UR 501 , which was ascribed to Homo rudolfensis and is 2.4 million years old - after the lower jaw fragment LD 350-1 - as the second oldest known evidence to date applies to an individual of the genus Homo . In 2009 his team also found the 2.5 million year old tooth MR 1106 in Malawi, which was also assigned to an individual of the genus Homo . This tooth was discovered not far from an equally old fossil from Paranthropus and was the first evidence that both species lived in the same place in Africa at the same time.

Bromage and Schrenk are jointly responsible for founding the Cultural and Museum Center Karonga in Malawi.

Life and research

Tim Bromage graduated from Sonoma State University with a bachelor's degree in anthropology , biology and geology in 1978 . He then moved to the University of Toronto , where he studied human genetics and behavioral sciences in particular, and in 1980 obtained a master's degree in anthropology. In 1986 he purchased in Toronto in the same compartment of the doctoral degrees : In his doctoral thesis he developed among others methods to gain from fossil bones and teeth information about the growth of these organs and to thus also close to the age of their former owners; Bromage published the first results in 1985 in the journal Nature .

Since that time, Bromage has been particularly concerned with the question of how one can obtain indications of the living conditions, eating habits and the climate during the lifetime of their previous owners from the fossils. He discovered, among other things, that the lamellar structure of bones allows conclusions to be drawn about the rate of growth and thus about the individual life story. He operates a database for the information metabolism and bone structure of the extant great apes , including humans are collected with the aim of being able to use this information later in relation to characteristics of fossils. One result of this research in 2008 is the discovery of a biological clock that controls processes such as feeding and sleep rhythms in mammals.

In 2010 he was awarded the Max Planck Research Prize for Evolutionary Anthropology together with Michael Tomasello .

Together with Friedemann Schrenk, Bromage is working on establishing a new academic subject called “paleobiomics”, into which, in addition to traditional paleoanthropology, all subject areas are to be integrated that describe the habitat of early humans (the “paleobiome”).

Since 2016, Bromage has been working on the establishment of new measuring techniques for drinking water quality and offers an online world map for viewing measurement results. It is argued that only a fraction of the chemical elements that can occur in water are regulated by law and therefore health risks are inevitably overlooked. The measure is part of the Metabolic Ecology Field Project.

In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Book publication

  • with Friedemann Schrenk: Adam's parents. Expeditions into the world of early humans. CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-48615-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The fossil Paranthropus MR 1106 . From: paleobiomics.org , accessed May 28, 2017.
  2. ↑ Cultural and Museum Center Karonga .
  3. ↑ Timothy G. Bromage, M. Christopher Dean: Re-evaluation of the age at death of immature fossil hominids. In: Nature , Volume 317, 1985, pp. 525-527, doi: 10.1038 / 317525a0
  4. ↑ biological clock
  5. ↑ Max Planck Society ( Memento of November 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ): "He researches how the living conditions of early humans can be read from the structure of bones and teeth."
  6. ↑ “Our science is immature.” On: fr-online.de of July 10, 2010
  7. ^ Metabolic Ecology Field Project
  8. ↑ Fellows of the AAAS: Timothy Bromage. American Association for the Advancement of Science, accessed February 21, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Bromage, Timothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bromage, Tim; Bromage, Timothy George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 1954