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Elen Feuerriegel: Cave Photographer & Explorer



 Elen Feuerriegel, 2015 Extraordinary Women Leader featured in this year’s EWLS magazine is also a 26 years old PhD Fellow at the Australian National University who studies Paleoanthropology. She is one of the six women cavers who discovered Homo Naledi. Her background consists of caving, rock climbing, and excavating fossils in mine shafts. She has a solid grasp of anatomy and is small to fit through the tiny of crevices that sit between the surface and what turned out as treasure trove of bones. When she started Her PhD, Elen didn’t think it would go anywhere until one day when she and the team she was on helped uncover Homo Naledi. It all started when She had responded to a posting on Facebook seeking small cavers. She stated "It's important that our achievements as women become more public. It sets the stage for very young girls to go into fields like this, without having to worry about discrimination or their own capabilities, because there's this legacy of women who have done this work before. And they've done it really, really well.”

Besides her excavating adventure in South Africa, she is also a photographer. What lead her in to photography was her research in looking at ways of recording morphological variations at sites where muscle attaches to the bone in humans and non-human primates. She mentioned that she is developing a technique that involves taking high resolution photographs of the skeletal material. She has always had an interest in photography but had only lacked the camera to really explore what she was wanting to do. She got in to Caving when she was about 10 years old. Her mother would take her and her sister on guided tours in the Jenolan caves in the Blue Mountains that are outside of Sydney.  It was a pitch dark and a claustrophobic nightmare for her mother but her and her sister loved it. “It was such as thrill and it stuck with me into adulthood.” Elen said.
#ewls #womencavers #speleology #ScienceWomen #WLeaders

SOURCES
www.canberratimes.com.au 
www.anu.edu.au
extraordinarywls.blogspot.com

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