Nina Jablonski facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Nina Jablonski
Jablonski in 2017
Born	Nina Grace Jablonski (1953-08-20) August 20, 1953 (age 72) Hamburg, New York
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Bryn Mawr College (1975 A.B.) University of Washington (1981 Ph.D.)
Awards	Fletcher Foundation Fellow, 2005, Guggenheim Fellowship, 2012
Scientific career
Fields	anthropology, palaeobiology, paleontology, human biology
Institutions	The Pennsylvania State University
Thesis	Functional Analysis of the Masticatory Apparatus of Theropithecus gelada (Primates: Cercopithecidae) (1981)
Notable students	Tina Lasisi

Nina Grace Jablonski, born on August 20, 1953, is an American anthropologist and palaeobiologist. She is famous for her studies on how human skin color has changed over time. She also teaches the public about human evolution, the amazing variety of people, and how to fight racism.

In 2021, she became a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, she joined the American Philosophical Society. She is currently an Evan Pugh University Professor at The Pennsylvania State University. She has written several books, including Skin: A Natural History and Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color. She also co-wrote Skin We Are In.

Becoming a Scientist
Nina Jablonski's Career
- Work in Asia and Australia
- California and Pennsylvania
Key Research Areas
See also

Becoming a Scientist

Early Life and Discoveries

Nina Jablonski grew up on a farm in upstate New York State. Her parents encouraged her to explore science from a young age. She remembers digging for fossils near creeks and trees around her home.

Her interest in human evolution began in the mid-1960s. She watched a National Geographic show about the famous paleoanthropologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey. Their work in East Africa, especially with ancient human relatives, really caught her attention. From that moment, she decided she wanted to study human evolution.

Education and Early Research

Jablonski earned her first degree in biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1975. That same year, she started her PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington. She studied the evolution of African Old World monkeys. In 1981, she completed her PhD with a paper about the chewing muscles of a monkey called Theropithecus gelada.

She has continued to research the evolution of Old World monkeys and other primates. These include tarsiers, lemurs, and chimpanzees. She has also taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Western Australia. During these years, she began her important research on how humans started walking on two legs (called bipedalism) and how human skin color evolved.

Family and Languages

Nina Jablonski is married to George Chaplin, who is also a professor and her research partner at Penn State University. She can speak and write fluently in Mandarin Chinese. She can also read in Latin and German.

Nina Jablonski's Career

Work in Asia and Australia

After finishing her PhD, Jablonski became a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. From 1981 to 1990, she continued her research into comparative anatomy (comparing body structures) and paleontology (the study of fossils). She worked with research institutes in Beijing and Kunming, China.

Her interest grew in how ancient environments in East Asia changed and affected the evolution of mammals, especially primates. While in Hong Kong, she also helped the police identify human remains. She worked with her husband, George Chaplin, on how humans started walking upright.

Later, Jablonski moved to Australia and worked at the University of Western Australia from 1990 to 1994. This is when she started her research on the evolution of human skin color. She realized that studying these topics could help scientists understand what happened in the past.

California and Pennsylvania

From 1994 to 2006, Jablonski worked at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She was recognized as a Fellow there and also by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She helped organize and publish important meetings about anthropology. One of these meetings focused on how the first people arrived in the Americas.

After California, she moved to The Pennsylvania State University in 2006. She led the Anthropology Department until 2011. Today, she is an Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology at Penn State. Her research there includes Old World monkeys, how primates control their body temperature, and the evolution of human skin color.

Since 2012, she has worked with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who hosts the PBS show Finding Your Roots. They developed a program to get younger students, especially students of color, more interested in STEM fields. Their PBS webisodes, "Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings," won several Emmy Awards.

Key Research Areas

Nina Jablonski studies human and primate evolution. She is especially known for her work on human skin.

Understanding Skin Color

Jablonski studies how skin works and how its color has changed over time due to evolution and society. She and her colleague George Chaplin looked at the skin color of people around the world. They compared it to the amount of ultraviolet radiation (UV) from the sun.

Their research showed that dark skin, with lots of sweat glands, likely developed as humans lost most of their body hair. This helped protect them from strong sunlight. They also found that women often have slightly lighter skin than men. Jablonski's main finding is that different skin colors around the world are a balance. It's about needing to protect against harmful UV radiation while also making enough vitamin D.

People living closer to the equator, where UV radiation is strong, tend to have darker skin. This is because more eumelanin (the pigment that gives skin its color) protects against UV damage. In areas with less sunlight, people tend to have lighter skin. This allows their bodies to make enough vitamin D, which is important for health.

Jablonski also connects this to modern life. People living indoors or far from their ancestors' sunny homelands might not get enough vitamin D. Not enough vitamin D can lead to health problems like rickets (a bone disease). Too much UV radiation can cause skin cancers.

Skin Color and Ideas of Race

Since 2010, Jablonski has focused on how skin color was used to create the idea of "races" during the European Enlightenment (a period of new ideas in the 1700s). She explains that naming groups of people based on skin color became common because it helped businesses and politicians involved in the Atlantic slave trade.

Jablonski's work on race and racism led her to be a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. She also received an honorary doctorate from Stellenbosch University for her efforts to fight racism worldwide.

Studying Old World Monkeys

Jablonski's research on Old World monkeys involves a lot of fossil hunting in Africa and Asia. She has made important discoveries, including an ape skull in China and the first identified chimpanzee fossils.

In 2004, she and Sally McBrearty found chimpanzee teeth fossils in Kenya. These fossils showed that chimpanzees lived in different habitats, not just forests. This discovery also showed that early humans and chimpanzees lived in the same areas at the same time.

Her work on the monkey group Theropithecus has also been very important. She found a nearly complete skeleton of Theropithecus brumpti. This showed that this ancient monkey was similar to the modern gelada, but much larger. Her research helps us understand the size, habitat, and diet of extinct Theropithecus monkeys.

Primate Body Temperature Control

In 1994, Jablonski studied a theory about how controlling body temperature (thermoregulation) might have influenced early humans to walk on two legs. She and her team found that the benefits of staying cool by walking upright were probably not strong enough to be the main reason for bipedalism.

In 2014, Jablonski began researching goose bumps. She was interested in how the skin of ring-tailed lemurs helps them control their body temperature. She found that early primates didn't have good networks of muscles that cause goose bumps. This might have affected their ability to find food in cooler places. She also thought that the ability to control body temperature without changing metabolism was important for larger brains to develop.

Jablonski also studies how ring-tailed lemurs behave to stay warm. In 2016, she went to Madagascar and observed that lemurs sunbathe and huddle together to keep warm.