Dr Cara Wall-Scheffler is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology at Seattle Pacific University. Her research focuses on the relationships between body shape, thermoregulation and locomotion in extinct and extant human populations. After completing her undergraduate studies at Seattle Pacific University (USA), she was admitted into Cambridge (St Edmunds) for her MPhil and was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship for her PhD proposal in 2001. Her PhD focused on the shifts in seasonal resource use by Mediterranean Neanderthals and humans during Marine Oxygen Isotope Stages 3. Following this work, her postdoctoral research at UW-Madison (USA) honed in on the relationship between modern human morphology and locomotor energetics in order to get a better sense of the tradeoffs between thermoregulation, reproduction and mobility. She is currently one of the leading authorities on the evolution of human sexual dimorphism and the comparison between lab and field based data in locomotor studies. She has published papers in the Journal of Human Evolution, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Journal of Archaeological Science, and the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Her most recent work is a book on the evolution of the human pelvis, published by Cambridge University Press.
Recent publications include:
Wall-Scheffler, C.M., Kurki, H., & Auerbach, B. (2020). The Evolutionary Biology of the Human Pelvis: An Integrative Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hora, M., Pontzer, H., Wall-Scheffler, C.M., & Sladek, V. (2020). Dehydration was not a limit for persistence hunting in Homo ergaster. Journal of Human Evolution 138: 102682. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248419300077
Wall-Scheffler, C.M. (2019). The seasonality of site use at Taforalt. In R.N.E. Barton, A. Bouzouggar, S.N. Colcutt, L. Humphrey (Eds.), Cemeteries and Sedentism in the Later Stone Age of NW Africa: Excavations at Grotte Des Pigeons, Taforalt, Morocco. Mainz: Schnell & Steiner, pp 309-312.
Long, E.S., Courtney, K.L., Lippert, J.C., & Wall-Scheffler, C.M. (2019). Reduced body size of insular black-tailed deer is caused by slowed development. Oecologia 189(3): 675-685. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-019-04367-3
Bouterse, L. & Wall-Scheffler, C.M. (2018). Children are not like other loads: A cross-cultural perspective on the influence of burdens and companionship on human walking. PeerJ 6: e5547. https://peerj.com/articles/5547/
