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Today Homo sapiens is a phenomenally successful, global species and the sole survivor of the human family tree, yet the adaptations that enabled this success are still poorly understood. Hybridisation with extinct human species during our expansion may have been one way of rapidly adapting to new environments. This is an important, dynamic area of research with novel technology and analytical methods showing, via ancient (a)DNA, that interbreeding episodes happened repeatedly during human evolution. Although hybrids can now be uncovered using aDNA, factors limiting its recovery, analysis, and interpretation mean that a combination of genetic and skeletal research will offer the fullest insights into hybridisation in our evolutionary story. The proposed PhD project is part of an international collaboration investigating the skeletal effects of hybridisation between humans and our extinct relatives by using monkey hybrids as proxies, overcoming the limitations of a scarce fossil record. Hybridisation is widespread in non-human primates, and it has been suggested that monkey hybrids demonstrate a skeletal signature of admixture. Such a signature could potentially be used to identify fossil human hybrids, yet key questions regarding the effects of evolutionary distance between the parents and their physical distinctness, remain unanswered.

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