Function: PhD student and research assistant

After finishing her bachelor’s degree in Archaeology and History at the University of Bonn, Jana Kunze decided to shift her focus towards Archaeological Sciences. Specializing in Paleoanthropology, she completed her M.Sc. in the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen in 2019. During the master’s program, she developed an interest in the analysis of hand bones, which resulted in a Master Thesis on the ontogeny of entheseal patterns in human hand bones. Jana Kunze continues this research in her PhD project, analyzing functional adaptations in the hominin hand skeleton and its muscle attachment sites. The project aims to reconstruct habitual hand use both in adults and subadults by analyzing entheseal patterns, and to investigate the relationships between entheseal patterns and bone morphology.
 

• Ontogeny of hominin hand bones
• Development of hominin manual dexterity
• Activity reconstruction
• 3-D geometric morphometrics
• Musculoskeletal stress markers