2024 Events

Location: Online

Tapeworms as a proxy for studying hominin meat eating and food cooking behaviors

Human Palaeosystems in Focus Seminar Series
This talk will feature results from integrative functional (experimental heating of tapeworm cysts and RNA sequencing) and evolutionary genomics analyses to help test hypotheses concerning hominin meat eating behavior and potential tapeworm adaptation to withstand heat stresses associated with hominin food cooking behavior. [more]

Tracking the features of hominin groups from their footprints: biology, locomotion, behaviors

Human Palaeosystems in Focus Seminar Series
Footprints open a window onto brief moments in life, a unique time scale that is inaccessible from skeletal remains or archaeological artefacts. Through this particular temporal scale, footprints provide original information about the groups who left them, and offer another point of view for understanding human evolution. Using several examples from the fossil record, this presentation will focus on the development of experimental methods used to study footprints. It will also demonstrate the diversity of information, but also its limitations, that can be obtained from this unique material, offering a unique perspective on human evolution. [more]

Evolutionary consequences of human multilevel social structure

Prof. Migliano will discuss her work over the past 15 years on extant hunter-gatherers social structure and how the human foraging niche has shaped patterns of hunter-gatherers mobility, cooperation and cumulative cultural evolution. [more]

Evolutionary Ecology of Hominins

Human Palaeosystems in Focus Seminar Series
Given that hominin evolution covers around seven million years, multiple taxa, many significant changes in range distribution, population size, habitat preference and diet, as well as increasing dependence upon technology, it is necessary to consider more precisely the way in which environment and resources influence evolutionary processes and outcomes. This talk will explore how different elements of the ecological context shaped macroevolutionary processes in hominin evolution. [more]

Genealogies of Anthropocentrism

How did we end up in the Anthropocene? In the human and social sciences, a growing consensus holds anthropocentrism responsible for setting human societies and the Earth System onto a collision course, typically defining anthropocentrism as human exceptionalism in viewing nature and other lifeforms as objects of human mastery and means to human ends. The nature of anthropocentrism and its exact role in driving the Anthropocene are, however, seldom subjected to thorough research. [more]
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