Scientist at Work: Melanie Everett
If piecing together the environment of 1.5-million-year-old hominids seems a little daunting, it follows that any scientist foolish enough to try should be made of stern stuff.
Meet Melanie Everett, a double Ph.D. student at Indiana University Bloomington. You read that right. Double. Ph.D.
Everett shirked neither theses nor theories when she decided that her interests necessitated doctorates in geology and anthropology. On track to complete both degrees this year (2009), Everett is an active researcher. Among her pre-professorial contributions to the literature is a November 2008 Science paper that reported the most complete H. erectus pelvis ever, not to mention plain evidence that hominid skull size had been getting bigger earlier than previously thought. IU Bloomington anthropologist Sileshi Semaw led the study.
"The field of paleoanthropology is very active -- we're learning quite a lot," Everett says. "One thing that may surprise people is that East Africa's environment over the last two million years wasn't that much different from today's. It was a very arid landscape. Even so, there were parts of East Africa that were wetter then than they are today; this is certainly true of the study area that I've worked on in Ethiopia."
Natural selection is driven by environment, so knowing more about geological and ecological conditions during early human and hominid periods helps scientists get a better feeling for what types of forces spurred human evolution.
"Many people believe the change to a savannah environment in this area of the world was important in directing human evolution," Everett says. "One theory is that as resources became more spread out, early hominids needed to move around more, requiring better memory and communication. These early hominids may have developed bigger brains to deal with these new pressures."
While she says she's genuinely interested in the ways human bodies evolved, what excites her most, she says, "is that the research is going to provide an environmental context for hominid research."
Jobs in environmental paleontology may not be plentiful, however. Everett decided her first job will be in industry -- as a geochemist for Chevron Corp.
"As a grad student researching early environments, I ended up being exposed to aspects of organic geochemistry," Everett says. "I'll be interpreting geochemical data from very old rocks and deposits. Has the organic matter 'matured' -- that is, been exposed to the appropriate degrees of heat and pressure? Is the petroleum stationary or is it moving?"
The gap between early hominid environments and oil exploration may seem vast, but both types of work involve detailed, painstaking analyses of rocks and the organic chemicals contained therein.
In fact, for her geology Ph.D., Everett has been looking at how to perfect the tools and methods biogeochemists use to study geoarchaeological samples.
"One of the big problems with working in arid regions," Everett says, "is that very little organic matter is preserved. We're looking at how you can make the most with what's left."
Everett named three scientists as having influenced her during her Ph.D. studies: IU Bloomington biogeochemist Lisa Pratt and IU Bloomington anthropologist Nick Toth, who are her Ph.D. program advisers in geological sciences and anthropology, and Case Western Reserve paleontologist Scott Simpson.
