Ashley Hammond’s research focuses on the discovery, description, and analysis of the fossil record for ape and human evolution, with special interests in biological form and function of the postcranial skeleton. She completed her PhD in 2013 in the Integrative Anatomy focus area at the University of Missouri. She subsequently held postdoctoral and teaching appointments at Stony Brook University, The George Washington University, and Howard University. In 2018, she became the Biological Anthropology curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, becoming a tenured professor and the Chair of the Division of Anthropology in 2022. In October 2025, she joined the ICP as an ICREA Research Professor to lead the newly-formed Hominin Origins Research Group.
Research interests
I am a paleoanthropologist integrating laboratory, museum, and fieldwork components in order to address questions related to hominin origins and postcranial evolution.
I am interested in the skeletal adaptations that differentiated the earliest human ancestors from apes, specifically related to origins of bipedality. In particular, I have focused on understanding the massive evolutionary transformations observed in the hominin pelvis. My recent work has emphasized the importance of the diverse array of fossil primates for contextualizing locomotor evolution and is challenging previous ideas about the trajectory of morphological changes that led to the earliest hominins.
I lead field research at two main localities in Kenya in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya. My work uses multiple-proxies to characterize hominin morphology, paleoenvironments, and paleoecology, and is an exemplar of a multidisciplinary, innovative, and inclusive modern field program.
Selected publications
– Braun, DR et al. 2025, ‘Early Oldowan technology thrived during Pliocene environmental change in the Turkana Basin, Kenya‘, Nature communications, 16 – 1 – 9401.