Biography
Dr. Freidline is a biological anthropologist who specializes in paleoanthropology. Her research focuses on the evolution and development of human craniofacial morphology. She applies state-of-the-art methods to interpret craniofacial growth in fossil species ranging from Homo erectus to H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens with the ultimate goal of better understanding the evolution of the H. sapiens face. Dr. Freidline combines geometric morphometric methods and surface histology to quantify macro and microscopic shape changes. Furthermore, as fossil bones are nearly always damaged, a large part of her work consists of virtual fossil reconstruction.
Dr. Freidline has developed novel methods for quantifying and visualizing surface bone histology in three dimensions, and has applied these methods to explore intraspecific variation in H. sapiens. She is currently applying these methods to other parts of the face and mandible in Plio-Pleistocene fossil hominins and human archaeological populations. The information gained from these studies seeks to improve our understanding of how and from whom the H. sapiens face evolved. She is also supervising a PhD project on the evolution of the H. sapiens mandible and working on the virtual reconstruction and comparative analyses of Middle and Late Pleistocene hominin fossils from Northern Africa and southeast Asia, respectively.
Dr. Freidline received her Ph.D. in 2012 working jointly at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany. From 2012 to 2020, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the MPI-EVA in the Department of Human Evolution.