Inspiration for a PhD thesis can come from anywhere. For Sarah, it came from a project in the School of Chemistry which was looking at pigs and how you could determine what they were eating from their bones. By feeding the pigs particular diets and then examining the isotopes in their bones, they could see how the diet correlated to the composition of the bones. She realised that some of those diets mirrored the diets of people from around 11,000 years ago, at the time of the introduction of farming. In places like Denmark and Portugal, there is evidence of people living on the coast eating loads of fish and then suddenly not eating fish anymore and going into farming. Researchers tend to talk about the changes in society and population growth, and the impact on art and civilisation. But there would also have been changes in their bones due to the shifting diet. So Sarah has been looking at the internal structure of the pigs’ vertebral bone and observing the differences; since pigs develop in a very similar way to humans they can be used as a model. The next stage of her research will be to consider how this information changes the way we think about humans as they first went into farming.
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
Research Encounter #13: Sarah Gosling
Sarah Gosling has been part of our team for the last few months, working with us on the Seeds of Change project. But she’s also about to start the 3rd year of her PhD and, by the time this is posted, will be in Kenya digging up fossils of the earliest humans.
Inspiration for a PhD thesis can come from anywhere. For Sarah, it came from a project in the School of Chemistry which was looking at pigs and how you could determine what they were eating from their bones. By feeding the pigs particular diets and then examining the isotopes in their bones, they could see how the diet correlated to the composition of the bones. She realised that some of those diets mirrored the diets of people from around 11,000 years ago, at the time of the introduction of farming. In places like Denmark and Portugal, there is evidence of people living on the coast eating loads of fish and then suddenly not eating fish anymore and going into farming. Researchers tend to talk about the changes in society and population growth, and the impact on art and civilisation. But there would also have been changes in their bones due to the shifting diet. So Sarah has been looking at the internal structure of the pigs’ vertebral bone and observing the differences; since pigs develop in a very similar way to humans they can be used as a model. The next stage of her research will be to consider how this information changes the way we think about humans as they first went into farming.
Inspiration for a PhD thesis can come from anywhere. For Sarah, it came from a project in the School of Chemistry which was looking at pigs and how you could determine what they were eating from their bones. By feeding the pigs particular diets and then examining the isotopes in their bones, they could see how the diet correlated to the composition of the bones. She realised that some of those diets mirrored the diets of people from around 11,000 years ago, at the time of the introduction of farming. In places like Denmark and Portugal, there is evidence of people living on the coast eating loads of fish and then suddenly not eating fish anymore and going into farming. Researchers tend to talk about the changes in society and population growth, and the impact on art and civilisation. But there would also have been changes in their bones due to the shifting diet. So Sarah has been looking at the internal structure of the pigs’ vertebral bone and observing the differences; since pigs develop in a very similar way to humans they can be used as a model. The next stage of her research will be to consider how this information changes the way we think about humans as they first went into farming.
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