Discovering Us: Great Discoveries in Human Origins
06.09.22 Dan Lieberman and Evan Hadingham discuss the thrilling stories behind some of the most important human origins discoveries ever made.
San Francisco, CA
October 10, 2016 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
$12 – $15In this talk, Dr. Curtis Marean argues for another food-related milestone: the turn toward foraging dense and predictable food resources. This shift in behavior led to elevated levels of group territoriality and conflict, which may have provided the ideal conditions for the evolution of the hyper-cooperative behaviors unique to modern humans. This coupled with the uses of newly invented projectile weapons contributed greatly to our ancestors’ ability to spread rapidly throughout the world, eliminating other competitors and driving many prey species to extinction.
Curtis W. Marean is a Leakey Foundation grantee and professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the associate director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Marean is interested in the relation between climate, environmental change and human evolution, both for its significance as a force driving past human evolution and as a challenge to be faced in the near future. This is a natural transdisciplinary topic that thrives at the intersection of archaeology, geology, geochemistry, geochronology, and climate and environmental sciences. Curtis has focused his career on developing field and laboratory teams and methods that tap the synergy between the disciplines to bring new insights to old scientific problems. He has spent over twenty years doing fieldwork in Africa and conducting laboratory work on the field-collected materials, with the goal of illuminating the final stages of human evolution – how modern humans became modern.