Nina Grace Jablonski[1] (born August 20, 1953)[2][3] is an American anthropologist and palaeobiologist, known for her research into the evolution of skin color in humans.

Louis Leakey's study at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa and his focus on the hominid Zinjanthropus boisei sparked Jablonski's attention.

She instantly decided that she wanted to pursue the study of human evolution, dismissing her parents' desire for her to attend medical school.

Working under the primary supervision of paleoanthropologist Gerald Eck, she became interested in the evolution of the African Old World monkeys and completed her PhD in anthropology in 1981 with the dissertation, "Functional Analysis of the Masticatory Apparatus of Theropithecus gelada (Primates: Cercopithecidae).

[11] Working in collaboration with colleagues from the Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, Jablonski created the collection of human skeletal remains at the University of Hong Kong.

[12] While still in Hong Kong, Jablonski began her research collaboration with George Chaplin on the origin of bipedalism in the human lineage; this work resulted in a series of publications in the early 1990s.

She felt that the study of such topics was valuable for researchers because it showed that basic tools of comparative and historical biology could be used to deduce what probably happened in the past.

Among the Wattis Symposium volumes she edited was The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World,[13] which included important contributions about the nature and timing of human movements into the Americas.

[14] Starting in 2012, in partnership with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., host of the PBS show Finding Your Roots, she led the development of a curriculum aimed at getting younger students of color more interested in STEM.

[15] A series of PBS webisodes, "Finding Your Roots: The Seedlings" was released in 2017 and 2018[16] with three of the episodes earning Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards in 2018[17] and 2019.

[23][24][25][26] Jablonski's recent collaboration with physiologists W. Larry Kenney and Tony Wolf at Penn State has yielded new research indicating a probable link between UV-induced folate loss and impaired thermoregulation.

[7][32][33] The naming of groups of people, later referred to as races, based on skin color has proven durable because of its reinforcement by European and American business interests and politicians of the 18th century who benefited from the transatlantic slave trade.

In 2004, along with Sally McBrearty, Jablonski discovered teeth in the collections of the National Museum of Kenya which originated from the Kapthurin Formation and dated back to ~545,000 years ago.

[40] More recently, Jablonski's fossil discoveries have been complemented by phylogenetic analysis of modern apes,[41] suggesting that genomic divergence in ancestral gibbons was in part due to habitat shifts during the Miocene–Pliocene transition.

Wheeler hypothesized that there was evolutionary pressure for early hominids to adopt bipedalism because an upright stance with less surface area exposed to sunlight allowed them to forage for longer without overheating.

Jablonski's team constructed their own models, which led to the conclusion that thermoregulatory benefits weren't significant enough for natural selection to favor bipedalism.

[48] Jablonski noted that early primates did not have effective networks of MAP throughout the body, a factor that may have significantly affected their ability to forage under the cooler conditions of the late Eocene epoch.