• Question: which sector does your work help the most? human life or the environment. finding plant to help the environment. or to do with food helping human life?

    Asked by shaz to Freddie, Jena, Kirsten, Kon, Zarah on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Jennifer Bates

      Jennifer Bates answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hi,
      I guess my work is to do with human life, food and the environment depending on what materials and sites I’m looking at!

      To give you some examples:

      I’ve recently looked at a Palaeolithic (Stone Age – 140,000 years ago) cave site thinking about how the environment changed during the Ice Age and how humans coped with those changes.

      I’m about to work on samples from a project that is looking at life in the fens in Peterborough from the late Bronze Age (3000 years ago).

      I’ve also been looking at Bronze Age (5000 years ago) food in India to think about how people make choices about what they eat when two cultures meet.

      I get to do a lot of different stuff depending on where I’m working and what questions I need to ask.

    • Photo: Kirsten Brandt

      Kirsten Brandt answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      My work is mostly about making food plants better so they can help human life more. But the same work also helps the environment, because when we learn more about the chemicals made by plants that help them to avoid diseases and pests, then we can also improve the plants we grow so they can be healthy with less use of pesticides.

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