Here, Blaine Maley is digitizing cranial data at the Panum Institute’s unheated morgue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

He reconstructed a Neandertal ribcage at the American Museum of Natural History.

A graduate student in physical anthropology, Blaine Maley is finishing his dissertation on the genetic relationship between early Arctic human populations.

I found anthropology while working as a sculptor in New York City. I was working with Gary Sawyer in the physical anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History to do fossil reconstructions for museum displays. Fascinated by what I learned about the evolution of the human morphological forms, I decided to come to Washington University to study anthropology with Erik Trinkaus.

I am now in my last year of graduate work. My dissertation research tests models of population continuity and replacement through time by discerning the genetic relationship between pre-contact Tigara (800-300 BP) and Ipiutak (2100-1300 BP) populations from Point Hope, Alaska. Toward this end, I have collected ancient mtDNA sequence data together with morphological variation in the form of discrete and quantitative cranial traits from the Ipiutak, Tigara, and other circum-Arctic populations.

Through analysis of this data, I hope to address the following questions:

• How does population structure change over time? Can we quantify the co-evolution of biology and culture?
• What are some of the mechanisms of biological change in modern human groups? Specifically, how does the environment (positive selection) interact with evolutionary forces such as drift and gene flow?
• What is the relationship of different genetic systems (cranial shape, discrete cranial markers, molecular data)? What is their practicality for quantifying population structure, and for testing hypotheses of population continuity and selection?
• To what extent can we quantify the complexity of geographical variation when juxtaposed with the reality of temporal variation? In other words, when archaeological sites vary in age, to what extent can we/should we make assumptions that the material can be pooled to connote a viable population?

Beyond these specific topics, my broader interests include using population genetics to understand modern human variation —as a tool to understand our history and to help us understand how we have used different notions of human variation (read racism) to understand the meaning of population subdivision through our history and the relevant (and sometimes sinister) political ramifications.