Weaver, Timothy D.

Timothy D. Weaver
Assistant Professor, PhD, Stanford University, 2002

Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616, USA

tdweaver@ucdavis.edu
Telephone: 530-754-4575
Fax: 530-752-8885
Office: 204 Young Hall

Education

I graduated from Dartmouth College in 1995, where I completed a double major in Computer Science and Earth Sciences with a thesis on computer visualization of fossils. After college, I worked for a year as a computer programmer at Oracle Corporation before starting graduate school in Anthropology at Stanford University. I finished my Ph.D. in 2002 with a thesis on the evolution of human hip (pelvis and femur) anatomy. I lectured for a year at Stanford, before moving to a one-year post-doctoral position in the Zoology Department at the University of Wisconsin, where I studied the energetics of human walking and running. I then went to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany for a two-year post-doctoral position to work on the evolution of Neandertals. I joined the UCD Anthropology department in 2006.

Research Interests

I study human evolution, with a focus on the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of Neandertals, and the related question of the origins of humans who were anatomically and behaviorally modern (like ourselves). Currently, my research focuses on two topics: 1) quantitative modeling of the evolution of differences in cranial morphology between Neandertals and modern humans; and 2) separating the influences of cold-climate adaptation, obstetrics, biomechanical and energetic constraints, and habitual activity levels on the anatomy of the Neandertal hip. Through my research into the evolution of hip anatomy, I am also interested in the origins of bipedal walking and running and the relationships between obstetrics, brain size, and life history patterns.

Answering different questions often requires different methods and datasets, so in my work I use multiple approaches, including 3-D geometric morphometrics, interactive computer visualization, biomechanics, energetics, and theoretical models from quantitative and population genetics.

Downloads 

If you would like to download STL and PLY files with the triangular mesh of the Tabun reconstruction presented by Weaver and Hublin (2009. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA) and an ASCII (.txt) file with the locations of the landmarks they analyzed (including the estimated landmarks), please click here.

Selected Publications

Weaver TD, Roseman CC, and Stringer CB (2008). Close correspondence between quantitative- and molecular-genetic divergence times for Neandertals and modern humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 105:4645-4649.

Weaver TD and Roseman CC (2008) New developments in the genetic evidence for modern human origins. Evolutionary Anthropology 17:69-80.

Roseman CC and Weaver TD (2007) Molecules vs. morphology? Not for the human cranium. BioEssays 29:185-188.

Weaver TD and Klein RG (2005) The evolution of human walking. In Human walking, 3rd Edition. Rose J and Gamble JG, Eds. Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins: Philadelphia, 23-32.

Weaver TD and Steudel-Numbers K (2005). Does climate or mobility explain the differences in body proportions between Neandertals and their Upper Paleolithic successors? Evolutionary Anthropology 14:218-223.

Weaver TD (2003). The shape of the Neandertal femur is primarily the consequence of a hyperpolar body form. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100:6926-6929.