Congratulations to Caroline Phillips
We congratulate paleoanthropology lecturer Dr Caroline Phillips who has been awarded a John Fell Fund grant to aid her project "Forgotten faunivory: Insects matter in the diet of our relatives, past and present".
The John Fell Fund is an internal research fund financed by Oxford University Press, please visit the John Fell website for full details on how to apply.
Below you can discover more details about Caroline's exciting project:
The proposed work has two stages, the first: to forge a high-resolution study of primate entomophagy using stable isotopes - Chimpanzees in Nimba Mountains, Guinea consume Dorylus ants; comparing nitrogen isotope signatures (δ15N) in samples of Dorylus taxa eaten by these apes with chimpanzee faecal signatures from this community. Second, to create an insect isoscape: a landscape of isotopic signatures from terrestrial insects that are abundant across seasons and habitats in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. It is aimed that this dataset will provide a valuable perspective for all workers who strive to bring this ‘forgotten faunivory’ to the fore in the study of human evolution, but to also expand our knowledge of primate and human entomophagy.
