“Harrison Lowe positioning a cast of a reindeer molar under the lens of a confocal laser microscope

Author: Harrison Lowe | Major: Anthropology | Semester: Fall 2022

I didn’t think being lost in Paris, with a phone entirely dead on one of the busiest days of the year, Bastille day, this previous Summer would lead to an Honors Research thesis that would take me to a small town 3 degrees North of the Arctic Circle just five months later. However, in my attempt to find my bearings in the most visited city in the world, by good fortune I met an anthropologist. A researcher at the Université de Toulouse, he asked if I knew Dr. Peter Ungar here at the University of Arkansas. While I didn’t know him then, I knew of his work on Homo naledi and was going to be in his Human Evolution course the following semester. Hearing Dr. Ungar’s name halfway across the world inspired me to look into his work (thank goodness for Google Scholar), and ultimately I found it very interesting. After a class the next semester, I asked Dr. Ungar if he had any room in his lab for another student, and fortunately he did! He needed another student working on his Arctic research, and I found the specific project, utilizing dental microwear to document and assess diet variation by habitat for reindeer in Arctic Finland, to be interesting and compelling for an Honors thesis. Since then, we have attained an Honors Team Research Grant and Short-Term Travel Grant to travel to a collection of reindeer mandibles in Arctic Finland to collect a very strong sample size for the study.

The primary need for this study is to assess a problem that is becoming increasingly critical- yet with little previous study: many populations of semi-domesticated free-ranging reindeer face starvation as their regular food sources are made unavailable by global warming and extreme weather events in the Arctic. To understand which populations are affected more prominently by this, we are looking at dental microwear patterns of reindeer from different regions of Finnish lapland. Dental microwear analysis utilizes a confocal laser microscope to see ‘foodprints’ left on molars of reindeer. Different microwear patterns suggest different food types. Lichen is the primary food source of reindeer, yet as the lichen biodensity is thinned in the rapidly changing Arctic climate, reindeer may end up consuming bits of rough soil sediment or turning to more abrasive food sources which will in turn leave different patterns of wear on the teeth.

This past semester of research, my first time conducting research, has largely been focused around learning the methodologies surrounding this studies- such as making casts from the molds of molars, learning how to effectively use the confocal microscope, and becoming familiar with the software used to collect data and create micrographs of the dental microwear. It has been quite a learning curve, but working with a team and doing actual scientific research has been loads of fun! I am entirely looking forward to traveling to the Arctic and cannot wait to see what comes about from the data we collect.