On May 8th, ELTE will honor Peter Ungar, professor at the University of Arkansas, with a Doctor Honoris Causa title. The American paleoanthropologist of Hungarian descent is a pioneering, internationally recognized expert in tooth wear research. As a broad-minded scientist, he successfully applies methods of paleoanthropology in several fields; currently, he leads a research project on climate change, and his findings are also utilized in dental medicine. We interviewed the professor about his research, future plans, as well as what teaching means to him and what paleontology can offer a 21st-century student.
What research area do you work in, and what are you currently working on?
My research focuses mostly on how environmental changes over deep time have driven the evolution of life as we see it today. I am probably best known for my work studying our ancestors and how the changing world made us human. New habitats meant new resources and new challenges; and I recontruct the diets of our ancestors to understand how these affected their food choices in the past. This work has involved developing new tools to infer diet, including dental topographic analysis, which relates the shapes of teeth to foods a species evolved to eat, and dental microwear texture analysis, which relates patterns of microscopic tooth wear to foods individuals actually ate. I have used these tools on many fossil species, from dinosaurs to early humans. They together allow my colleagues and me to determine both what species were adapted to eat and what they ate on a daily basis.
What are your plans for the future?
I plan to continue developing and applying these tools to infer diets of fossil species. But I am also now starting to use them in other ways. For example, my colleagues and I are studying teeth of reindeer, rodents, and foxes of the Arctic to determine how climate change is affecting the diets of mammals living at high latitudes today. We cannot go and watch these animals eat year after year as ice caps melt and glaciers retreat. But we can study teeth of animals collected in the recent past to see their effects. I am also beginning to apply these tools for clinical dentistry. Our early studies indicate that dental microwear reflects rate and cause of tooth wear in dental patients today. Excessive wear is a problem for many populations, and our approaches might help clinicians identify it early and help patients plan ways to stop it.
Are you one of those scientists who already knew in primary school what they wanted to do? How did your career begin?
Yes! I was in primary school when I first visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York and saw the giant dinosaur skeletons. I knew then that I wanted to be a paleontologist. When I was a little older, my father took me to see the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey”. I was inspired by the opening scene wherein the our ancestors started to become human. The idea that they were transformed by their wits and used tools made from the stones and bones around them to overcome the challenges of nature fascinated me. It set me on my course.
My first job was as a postdoc at Johns Hopkins Medical School teaching anatomy, but my interest in teeth really began when I was a graduate student at Stony Brook University. I did a class project on front tooth wear in human ancestors and realized that little was known about how those teeth are used in living primates and how different uses lead to distinctive patterns of wear. I took on that topic, and it led me to the field to study wild primates in Venezuela and Indonesia. This gave me a new appreciation for the relationships between organisms and their envrionments and how
habitat changes could drive food choice. I have continued on that path ever since, with studies of many fossil species.
What does teaching mean to you — whether teaching university students or reaching the wider public through popular science lectures and articles?
There has been nothing more gratifying in my career than seeing a student succeed -- whether it’s a beginning undergraduate who finally understands a difficult concept, or a newly-minted PhD getting his or her first job in the discipline. These are our legacies as academics. This is how we can make a difference in people’s lives. Popular science is very important. It is not so much about sharing the details as it is about showing how science is done. In the case of paleontology, it is about showing that it is not the fossil bones that hold wisdom but, rather, the scientists that give them meaning who do. A responsible global citizenry must decide who and what to believe in these times of increasing social media and AI influence, and science has a key role to play in that.
I also believe that teaching and public outreach go hand-in-hand with research. Teaching makes academics better researchers because it helps us see what’s important. We get so focused on the details of our research that is easy to lose sight of the big picture. Teaching helps us answer the question, "why care about our research?” But research also makes us better teachers. It gives us the authority and perspective/experience to teach and share stories that students can learn from.
In your view, how open and interested are people today in anthropology and paleontology?
When I visit natural history museums for research, I always take time to walk through the public exhibits. I love seeing the joy and wonder on the faces of young childen when they come face-to-face with a dinosaur skeleton or a fossil human skull. We are naturally open and interested. It is invigorating for me as a researcher, and it reminds me of why I got into the field in the first place.
Our job as anthropologists and paleontologists is to encourage that feeling of wonder and awe, and use it to (going back to the previous question) share with students and the general public the process of doing science.
Many people think of paleontology as a field concerned only with the distant past, yet your results also have an impact on the lives of people today and on the development of medicine. How important do you think it is for research findings to have an impact on contemporary society? How much do you think we can learn from the past?
I have thought a lot about this during my many years in the discipline. Put another way, how can basic science be applied to benefit humankind? At the end of the day, you never know what valuable spinoffs will result. In addition to providing examples that get people excited and thinking about the science more broadly, paleontologists use the past to provide context to understand the present and to predict the future. Our tools, as I said before, can be used to see pathological tooth wear long before it becomes obvious to dentists and to explain why it’s happening. I have even applied microwear texture analysis to analyzing skin lesions for diagnostics. As metrologists say, "surfaces cover everything” and the techniques we use can be applied broadly. Dental microwear can also be used to monitor impacts of climate change on diets of living animals. They can be used to gauge resilience of threatened species and better understand how climate change affects them so policy makers can develop better strategies for conservation.
How did you come into contact with the Hungarian paleontological community and Attila Ősi’s group, and why do you consider this connection important?
I first came into contact with the Hungarian paleontological community in the early 1990s when I joined László Kordos’ team working at the fossil site of Rudabánya in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county. Prof. Kordos had a long affiliation with ELTE over the course of his illustrious career. I first came into contact with Attila Ősi when he was a high school student interested in pursuing a career in paleontology. He wrote for advice, and I encouraged him and sent some reprints. I have followed his career closely since, and have been delighted to see his rise to academic prominence for his work on Cretaceous dinosaurs of the Bakony Mountains.
He and his colleagues, including Enikő Magyari, József Pálfy, András Galácz, and others, have made ELTE the #1 paleontology program in Hungary,
and one of the best in Central Europe. I was delighted when Prof. Ősi asked me to vist ELTE to deliver a lecture and to present my work at Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the early 2020s. I have enjoyed working with Prof. Ősi and other paleontologists at ELTE on research plans, and I look forward to more work with them in the future.
The connection is especially important to me given my own Hungarian heritage. My grandfather was born and raised in a small village near Nyíregyháza and my grandmother was born and grew up in Sárospatak (in the same county as Rudabánya). I feel a close connection with Hungarian science in general and with its paleontology in particular; and am honored to be recognized by and work with such eminent researchers at the top university in the country.
How did you react to the news that you would be awarded an honorary doctorate by ELTE? What does this recognition mean to you?
I was stunned! I was so surprised and humbled to be recognized by the #1 paleontology group at the #1 university in Hungary. It is an incredible honor for which I am grateful.
What will your honorary doctoral lecture be about?
I will discuss my work developing dental microwear texture analysis as a method for reconstructing diets of fossil animals and focus on my core research – what teeth can teach us about the evolution of human diet. I will also present some other examples of my work using microwear, including the study of 10 million year old fossil primates of Hungary, the last remaining human hunter-gatherers in Africa (the Hadza of Tanzania), and mammals under changing climate conditions in the Arctic today.
What advice would you give to a student today who is interested in anthropology and paleontology? What can this field offer a young person in the 21st century?
My advice would be to follow your heart, but to go into the field with your eyes wide open. While there are limited employment opportunities in anthropology and paleontology today, if you work hard, remain passionate, and are flexible with your plans, success is possible. It is also true that the skills learned in anthropology and paleontology programs are broadly marketable. They can offer young people training in computer programming and data analysis, digital and information literacy, critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, collaboration and communication, and many other tools important for success in the 21st century.
(Cover picture: Peter Ungar, credit: University of Arkansas)