Myths of 'Modern' Human Origins: New Perspective from Africa's Oldest Humans
Feb. 15 2013, Friday 7:30pm
Earth and Space Sciences Building, Room 001
Stony Brook University
Professor John J. Shea
Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University
For decades, paleoanthropologists have explained differences between the earliest member of our species, Homo sapiens and recent humans as reflecting the evolution of "behavioral modernity." If there were a trend towards behavioral modernity in human evolution, it should be apparent in the archaeological record for Eastern Africa, the region with the longest fossil record for Homo sapiens. Analysis of variability in stone tool technology over the last 275,000 years in Eastern Africa reveals no trend in human behavioral evolution, but instead a wide range of behavioral variability from before our species origins to recent times.
John J. Shea is Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York and Research Associate of the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya. He is an alumnus of Boston University (BA 1978) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1991). Shea’s research focuses on the archaeology of human evolution, namely the origin of our species, Homo sapiens, and the extinction of the Neanderthals. He is an expert at making, using, and analyzing stone tools whose work has been featured in more than a dozen television documentaries and in exhibits in the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution). Shea has conducted archaeological surveys and excavations in Israel, Jordan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya. His new book, Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Near East has just been published by Cambridge University Press.
This lecture and other Darwin Day activities are a continuation of a regular annual celebration of Darwin and the implications of organic evolution in science and society, held at Stony Brook and many other institutions to celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin.
Sponsored by the Department of Ecology and Evolution, the Office of the Provost.
For more information, visit Living World
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