Dr. Brophy to Participate in Rising Star Workshop in South Africa

Dr. Juliet Brophy has been accepted to participate in the Rising Star Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa in May/June 2014. Rising Star is a recently discovered site that produced over 1200 early fossil hominin elements. The Centre of Excellence in PalaeoSciences and the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits is holding a workshop to study and describe this material. Dr. Brophy will document the occlusal morphology and cuspal arrangement of the Rising Star hominin teeth and compare these teeth to her database of South African australopithecine and South and East African early Homo teeth. The aim of this research is to help establish the phylogenetic relationships of the Rising Star material relative to other hominins.