About me and my research

Hello! My name is Isabelle Winder, and I am a PhD student at the University of York, in the department of Archaeology. I am originally from Cambridge, and have a BSc in physical geography and an MSc in palaeoanthropology, both from the University of Sheffield. I find both subjects fascinating, and have chosen to continue to a research career in order to continue learning about them. This blog is my way of sharing those interests with any interested parties; it will contain comments on the big stories (new and old), reviews of articles and books that I read, and my thoughts about new finds and theories.

I am currently working on a project that develops a new approach to the "Neanderthal Problem" through a holistic analysis of Neanderthal and modern human morphological differentiation, niche overlap and landscape exploitation. This project is supervised by Prof. Geoff Bailey, who recently won the Antiquity prize for a joint paper on the importance of dynamic landscapes to hominin evolution. More generally, though, I am interested in hominin evolution and ecology, landscape reconstruction and exploitation by various species, human and comparative anatomy and primate evolution and adaptation, as well as physical geography and earth science.

I am a student member of the Paleoanthropology society and the Primate Society of Great Britain.