Mackie O’Hara is a PhD candidate who followed her passion for understanding origins to a career focused on human origin stories. After enrolling in a course on hominid paleoanthropology as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Mackie declared her major and decided to focus on paleoanthropology and the evolution of hominin teeth. As a graduate student now, her research centers around enamel thickness and how dental morphology relates to diet.
Her dissertation, titled Functional implications and developmental correlates of enamel thickness in hominins, with an emphasis on Homo naledi, examines the relationships among hard object feeding, enamel thickness, tooth size, and tooth shape in non-human primates and hominins. Mackie hopes to first understand adaptations to hard-object feeding in non-human primates and then see if there’s evidence of these adaptations in the hominin fossil record.
HEADS represents an important part of Mackie’s graduate school experience because it keeps her up to date on what’s happening in other fields of anthropology and within the department.
