Human Evolution

with Tim White

Saturday October 15, 2016 at 11:00 AM

159 Mulford Hall, UC Berkeley

Understanding human evolution is a quest that has occupied scholars and fascinated the public for many generations . This endeavor is now geographically and disciplinarily vast, encompassing rapidly moving studies across the earth, biological, and social sciences. New insights are correspondingly dramatic. Berkeley has long played a role in advancing human evolutionary studies, and that proud tradition continues today. Fossil discoveries in Africa and Eurasia have now demonstrated the broad outlines of how we diverged from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. They clarify the sequence through which human ancestors began to walk on two legs and ended up evolving progressively unusual anatomies across the last seven million years. The Middle Awash study area of Ethiopia has contributed the longest fossil and archaeological records of this evolutionary history, and continues to reveal our past in ways that Charles Darwin could never have imagined.

Tim White did his undergraduate work in biology and anthropology at the University of California at Riverside, and a received a PhD in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan. He came to Berkeley as a visiting lecturer in 1977, and is today a Professor of Integrative Biology and Director of the Human Evolution Research Center (HERC: http://middleawash.org.) He has conducted fieldwork across the New and Old Worlds, and co-leads the international Middle Awash paleoanthropological research project in Ethiopia. This free public talk is presented as part of the monthly “Science@Cal Lecture Series” Event Contact: scroft@astro.berkeley.edu