Faculty & Staff

Robert L. Anemone

Robert Anemone Professor
Biological Anthropology and Paleoanthropology
Ph.D., University of Washington
Email: robert.anemone@uncg.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Research Website

Research Interests

Primate and Human Evolution
Race and Human Diversity
Functional Morphology
Vertebrate Paleontology
GIS and Remote Sensing
Growth and Development

Courses Taught

ATY 204: Anthropology Through Film
ATY 231: Race and Human Diversity
ATY 453: Human Osteology
ATY 495: Contemporary Issues in Anthropology

Personal Statement

As a paleoanthropologist, I am broadly interested in Human and Primate Evolution, seeking to understand what the fossil record tells us about the patterns and processes involved in the evolution of humans and our primate relatives, the apes, monkeys, and prosimians. Early in my career I worked on the functional morphology of prosimian primates in relation to their patterns of locomotion, and on life history of apes and humans as revealed through an analysis of dental development. More recently I have focused my research on primate and human paleontology. My fieldwork has ranged widely across both geographic space (from the American West to Eastern and Southern Africa), and time (from the Late Cretaceous to the Pleistocene), and with respect to taxonomy (including studies of non-primate mammals, prosimian primates, apes and hominins). Recently I have been developing and field-testing predictive models for locating fossils based on the analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery and utilizing analytical approaches from Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I am also committed to using the tools provided by Anthropology to interrogate the multiple and complex meanings of Race and Human Diversity in American society through my scholarship, teaching and outreach.

Books

Robert L. Anemone (2019). Race and Human Biological Diversity: A Bio-Cultural Approach.
2nd ed. Routledge, London and New York. (Prentice Hall, 2010) (view on Amazon)
Robert L. Anemone and Glenn C. Conroy (eds) (2018). New Geospatial Approaches to the
Anthropological Sciences. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque (view on Amazon)

Articles

RL Anemone, B Nachman (2017) North American fossil primate record. IN: The International Encyclopedia of Primatology, A Fuentes (ed.), James Wiley & Sons, Inc.
doi: 10.1002/9781119179313.wbprim0361 (view PDF)
CW Emerson, RL Anemone (2017) Remote sensing. IN: The International Encyclopedia
of Primatology, A Fuentes (ed.), James Wiley and Sons, Inc. doi:10.1002/9781119179313.wbprim0359 (view PDF)
CW Emerson, B Bommersbach, B Nachman, RL Anemone (2015) An object-oriented approach to extracting productive fossil localities from remotely sensed imagery. Remote Sensing, 7(12), 16555-16570; doi:10.3390/rs71215848. (view PDF)
RL Anemone, CW Emerson (2014) Fossil GPS. Scientific American, 310: 46-51 (May 2014).
RL Anemone, MM Skinner, W Dirks (2012) Are there two distinct types of hypocone in Eocene primates? The “pseudohypocone” of notharctines revisited. Palaeontologia Electronica, 15.3.26A (http://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2012-issue-3-articles/306-hypocones-in-eocene-adapids).
GC Conroy, CW Emerson, RL Anemone, KEB Townsend (2012) Let your fingers do the walking: a simple spectral signature model for “remote” fossil prospecting. Journal of Human Evolution, 63: 79-84. (view PDF)
RL Anemone, MR Dawson, KC Beard (2012) The early Eocene rodent Tuscahomys (Cylindrodontidae) from the Great Divide Basin, Wyoming: Phylogeny, biogeography, and paleoecology. Annals of the Carnegie Museum, 80 (3): 187-205. (view PDF)
RL Anemone, CW Emerson, GC Conroy (2011) Finding Fossils in New Ways: An Artificial Neural Network Approach to Predicting the Location of Productive Fossil Localities. Evolutionary Anthropology, 20:169-180. (view PDF)
RL Anemone, GC Conroy, CW Emerson (2011) GIS and Paleoanthropology: Incorporating New Approaches from the Geospatial Sciences in the Analysis of Primate and Human Evolution.Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 54:19-46. (view PDF)

Current Projects

My current project in the Great Divide Basin (GDB) of SW Wyoming focuses on aspects of the evolution of the earliest primates, which lived ca. 55 million years ago in sedimentary basins like the GDB in the American West as well as in parts of western Europe and Asia (notably China). The current focus of this project is on the development and testing of predictive models for the location of fossils based on the analysis of satellite imagery. This project has been supported by a $180,000 National Science Foundation grant (BCS-1227329) entitled Developing and Testing New Geospatial Approaches in Paleoanthropology.