2018 Raymond Dart Lecture with Dr Rick Potts

2018 Raymond Dart Lecture with Dr Rick Potts
2018 Raymond Dart Lecture with Dr Rick Potts

Principal speaker

Professor Rick Potts

Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution is proud to host the 4th Annual Raymond Dart lecture with Dr Rick Potts paleoanthropologist and Director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC as he discusses the significance of climate adaptability in the origin of our species.

East Africa is a source of much information about the evolution and environments of early humans. Analysis of Earth's orbital dynamics offers a way of modelling climate dynamics over the past 5 million years in this region of the world. The origin of early human lineages in Africa, transitions in stone technology, and geographic dispersals all coincide with prolonged intervals of intense arid-moist variability. An example related to the origin of Homo sapiens shows how climate dynamics and resource uncertainty may have shaped the adaptive flexibility of our species. This flexibility was expressed in the early development of mobile technologies, social networks, and symbolic behaviour around 320,000 years ago in the southern Kenya rift valley. A long climate sequence obtained by drilling at the site of Olorgesailie, Kenya, will test these ideas about the significance of adaptability in the origin of our species.

Register now as numbers are strictly limited.


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RSVP by email damian.harris@griffith.edu.au

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