Graduate students of anthropology and paleontology displayed their research for the public before a talk on the connection between humans and Neanderthals by a guest speaker Thursday night.

Kenda Honeycutt, graduate student of anthropology, said the presentation was a way for graduate students to display their work, and for people to see Green speak.

“We just decided that we didn’t really have a symposium for our department, so we got Dr. Edward Green to come and speak,” Honeycutt said.

The event, held at the N.C. Natural Science Museum in downtown Raleigh, hosted a reception in which visitors got the chance to speak to various graduate researchers.

Displays ranged from biological analyses of dinosaur fossils to the improvement of fingerprinting technology. Nichole Fournier, graduate of anthropology, does exactly that.

“I’m going to be quantifying fingerprints so it isn’t a subjective science like it is now,” Fournier said.

Fournier said fingerprinting is often looked upon no further than the human eye, which could lead to mistakes.

“Everyone’s opinion is different, and years of experience [of fingerprinting] don’t really matter anymore,” Fournier said.

Fournier looks at the details of fingerprints that connect ridges, called ‘Galton details,’ that can clearly identify a person’s fingerprint. Fournier hopes to see her research become successful and widely used.

“It’s not quantifiable right now, but hopefully it [will be] quantifiable,” Fournier said.

Candice Chambers, graduate student of anthropology, presented her research of osteoarthritis of humans. She compared hand bone samples from humans in Cincinnati, OH and came to an interesting conclusion.

“So basically I looked at historical cases [of osteoarthritis] and related it to hand bones,” Chambers said.

Chambers said there was a clear connection between increased osteoarthritis over time and industrialization.

“Early on you see people living in farmsteads… as you see people move more into the city, you see more osteoarthritis,” Chambers said.

With industrialization, humans worked with their hands more, putting a larger strain on the bones.

Following the symposium of research was a lecture by Edward Green, professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Green spoke about the origins of humans today, and our relation to Neanderthals and other primates.

“One of the things I’m interested in is what makes humans unique,” Green said.

Although admittedly different, Green criticized some scientists for looking at the differences between humans and Neanderthals instead of the similarities.

“The similarities are much more numerous than the differences,” Green said. “One thing everyone in our field will agree on is that Neanderthals are the most similar [creatures] to us,” Green said.

Green explained that, in fact, most humans do have a portion of Neanderthal in their genes. This means that thousands of years ago, a portion of humans mated with Neanderthals before the species was extinct.

“Some humans may have a more common ancestor to a Neanderthal than someone else,” Green said.

He explained that, other than the native population of West Africa, all humans have a small percentage of Neanderthal genes.

Green said it is highly likely that at the time that there were several hominid species living among each other. He explained that humans likely mated with Neanderthals for an evolutionary advantage, and that the genes spread among most humans over thousands of years.

“One thing we have to understand about Neanderthals is that their genome is very similar to us,” Green said. “Neanderthals are [genetically] ten times closer to us than