Human Evolution Lecture Videos
Anna K. Behrensmeyer
Faunas, floras, and footprints – the paleontological context of human evolution in
the Turkana Basin
Interest in human evolution in the Turkana Basin has helped to generate a wealth of knowledge about the ancient faunas and floras of this rift basin. Kay Behrensmeyer will present highlights of this extraordinary fossil record and how it provides essential information for understanding human evolution.
José Braga
Robust australopithecines in South Africa: recent insights from Kromdraai
José Braga will present new evidence on the paleobiology of the 'robust' australopithecines in South Africa, and its evolutionary implications.
Thure Cerling
Fifty years of progress in understanding environments of human evolution in Africa
When Richard Leakey first set foot in the Turkana Basin in the late 1960s, paleoenvironmental interpretations of terrestrial deposits were rudimentary compared to today. Questions posed by paleontologists and anthropologists were the catalyst for developing methods to understand paleoecology; hand-in-hand, new tools prompted further questions and today, isotope geochemistry is used in virtually every site of interest to human evolution.
Robert Foley
Turkana, Eastern Africa and the Afrotropical model of hominin evolution
Turkana and Eastern Africa are well known for their fossiliferous environments, hominin record, and the many field projects that have exploited its potential. However, equally important is their biogeographical context, and in this paper we explore ideas from biogeography and ecology and their implications for human evolution.
Yohannes Haile-Selassie
Mid-Pliocene hominin diversity: the fossil evidence
The presence or absence of mid-Pliocene hominin diversity has been a subject of debate for the last two decades. The talk will address this issue based on the available fossil evidence from eastern Africa.
John Hawks
Opening new frontiers in human origins
The talk will look at recent innovations in field and laboratory approaches to human origins, including how researchers are finding new ways to integrate them. John Hawks will take a look at what questions these approaches are likely to answer over the next decade.
Gregory Henkes
Stable isotope paleothermometry of human origins in the Turkana Basin
The stable isotope geochemistry of terrestrial carbonates is among the most important recorders of paleoclimate and paleoenvironments in East Africa. In this talk, Greg Henkes will describe our efforts to apply clumped isotopes - a novel isotope thermometer - to reconstruct ancient climates in Turkana, and he will discuss future advances and research directions.
Louise Leakey
Six decades - the search for fossils at Lake Turkana
An overview of the discoveries and expeditions of the Koobi Fora Research Project in the Turkana Basin.
Julia Lee-Thorp
Isotope biogeochemistry and early hominin diets
This talk will look back at the genesis of isotope chemistry applied to the hominin record, examine what we have learned, and pick out some opportunities for future progress.
Carrie Mongle
Bayesian tip-dating approaches to inferring evolutionary relationships among hominin
taxa
One of Richard’s lasting legacies is undeniably the extraordinary number of hominin fossils he was able to add to our collective understanding of human evolution. Phylogenetic inference is a critical step in figuring out how all of these fossils come together to form the human family tree. This talk will review our recent work in reconstructing the hominin phylogeny, including new analyses to incorporate geochronological information into these inferences.
Lucía Nadal
Organization of complex morphological diversity in ‘robust’ australopithecines and
implications for intraspecific variability
The collection of mandibular fossils attributed to Paranthropus boisei holds a striking variability that has been explained as being the result of either sexual dimorphism, taphonomic damage, chronological change, or potential taxonomic heterogeneity. This talk presents new research characterizing the three-dimensional shape variability of this hypodigm using unsupervised machine learning algorithms to test for various contributing factors and describe patterns of morphological variability in ‘robust’ australopithecines.
Thomas "Cody" Prang
A morphometric assessment of fossil hominin feet in the Turkana Basin
This talk will review the functional and evolutionary implications of fossil hominin foot morphology in the Turkana Basin with special emphasis on a new partial foot (KNM-ER 64062).
Denné N. Reed
A comprehensive database of the published hominin fossils from the Lake Turkana basin
The Turkana Basin represents one of the largest assemblages of early hominin fossils. This paper presents the first, comprehensive, validated digital catalog of all the published hominin fossil material from this area.