Researcher Profile

John Kappelman wants to know where we came from. Not our hometowns, not where our grandparents came from and nor even how many generations our families have been in Texas. He goes back a bit further.

Kappelman, holding a modern human skull, has studied the relationship between brain size and body size in humans.

“My main interest is in trying to address the place of humans on the planet and that’s within the context of other mammals and our geologic history,” says Kappelman, a professor of physical anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts. “(I want to) try to understand why it is and how it is we became the sort of species that we are today, and look in some detail at the evolution of our unique attributes.”

Those attributes include walking erect on two legs, possessing a big brain, and living and working in complex cultures.

To find these answers, Kappelman has worked to find fossils in East Africa, China, Turkey, and Java and analyze what the fossils mean. He also teaches courses ranging from Introduction to Physical Anthropology to graduate seminars.

His current field project is in the hills of northwest Ethiopia.

The team, which Kappelman leads, found mammal fossils dating to 27 million years ago, a period for which there had been little information. The findings have filled gaps of understanding about the evolution of African mammals and provided the earliest evidence for some modern mammals such as today’s African elephants. The findings were published in Nature in December 2003.

Kappelman uses the traditional tools of fieldwork: shovels, brushes and dental picks.

Workers at Kappelman’s most recent research site in Chilga, Ethiopia, dig with painstaking delicacy to find clues about the past.

But he also uses satellites and advanced scanning equipment. Satellites help find places to work and scanning digitizes fossils for further study and to share with others.

Kappelman has worked with the university’s Center for Space Research to gather and analyze information from satellite images to find promising places with exposed sediment.

Then he conducts preliminary fieldwork to groundtruth that the site has sediments and that they are of the appropriate age to hold the kinds of fossils Kappelman is interested in.

For digitizing fossils, Kappelman uses “a combination of laser scanners and the university’s high-resolution X-ray computerized tomography lab.”

“We’re making those data more readily accessible to students, so they’re learning to do the analyses right along with looking at the actual specimens themselves,” he says.

He also uses the digitized images on tests.

Students from around the world can find skeletal images of a chimp or orangutan on the eSkeletons Project Web site. This Web site, like much of Kappelman’s work, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). He also receives funding from the Leakey Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

One of the finds of the Ethiopia project was a fossilized bone from an arsinoithere, an extinct fossil mammal from Ethiopia that lived 27 million years ago.

A grant from the university allowed Kappelman to pursue early work on the Ethiopia project. The information from that research led to more funding, culminating in a multi-year grant from the NSF.

“The point can easily be made that this sort of seed funding from UT can produce large yields,” he says.

One of the issues Kappelman has studied is the evolution of the human brain. The common understanding is that the brain has grown gradually over time.

Kappelman’s research, however, indicates otherwise.

“Some of the work I did a few years ago looks at the relationship between brain size and body size and argues that there were probably long periods of stasis where there weren’t really any significant changes,” he says. “And when we get to modern humans there does seem to be an increase in relative brain size.”

Kappelman’s research involves more than mammals. He holds the fossil of a plant seed dating back 27 million years.

Kappelman says that increase might be a result of cultural factors. It “might have to do with humans taking on different kinds of attributes with culture starting to play a really significant role in our behavior whereas prior to those times we relied on more culturally aided rather than culturally dependent behaviors,” he says.

Kappelman says it’s important for students to be able hear the results of such research from the people who do the research—and that’s an advantage that The University of Texas at Austin has.

“This means that we need to keep up on our research, keep up on the research of the field, and keep that front and center before the students,” he says, “so they realize just how dynamic these areas of study are that we operate in and that they then become a part of that process, too, so that they are learning things that were generated this week, last week, and even next week as opposed to a stale textbook that was written several years ago. That’s a significant difference about this institution that we need to remind ourselves of.”

Tim Green
Photos of Dr. Kappelman: Marsha Miller
Fieldwork photos: John Kappelman

Related Sites

John Kappelman’s faculty Web site
Newly discovered Ethiopian fossils open window on Africa’s “missing years”