The first PhD student for FINDER, Samantha Brown, arrived in Europe from her native Australia to undertake a 3-year research degree with FINDER.
After obtaining her BA in Archaeology in Australia, Samantha (Sam) moved in 2016 to the University of Oxford where she received a MSc degree. For her Masters dissertation she worked on the pilot study that led to FINDER. She used peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS) and radiocarbon dating to identify taxonomically and directly date using radiocarbon about 2500 bones from Denisova Cave. Within this assemblage she discovered a tiny human bone (DC 11) and the findings of this work were published in 2016 [1].
In FINDER will expand on this work, analysing more sites from Siberia using ZooMS, radiocarbon dating and aDNA analysis.
