David McGahan

I am a bioarchaeologist with particular interest in the mechanisms that drive biological diversitfication. My research primarily concerns understanding environmental adaptive variation, skeletal biomechanics, and functional anatomy. I employ 3-D modelling of bones and engineering principles to understand the ways in which human behaviour influences skeletal anatomy. With backgrounds in both archaeology and clinical human anatomy, I became involved in archaeological excavations throughout, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Since 2010, I have concentrated on projects in Philippines, Indonesia, and Eastern Australia, seeking to understand hominin expansion through the region over the last million years. The Maros karst of South Sulawesi is my current research focus and vital to understanding population dispersal and behaviour at the ecological, geographic and cultural crossroads of mainland Sunda (mainland East Asia) and Sahul (Australia and P.N.G.). My other area of interest is environmental adaptations in Senegalese savannah chimpanzees and their relevance to human evolution.