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The first 4 million years of human evolution

19 - 20 October 2009 09:00 - 17:00

Organised by Professor Alan Walker FRS and Professor Christopher Stringer FRS 

Spectacular discoveries of early members of the human lineage including nearly complete skeletons and dozens of other 6 to 2 million year old fossils have been made recently.  Also new methods are now available to extract behavioral and life history information from such fossils.

This meeting brings together field and analytical researchers to develop a synthetic account.

The proceedings of this meeting have been published as a special issue of Philosophical Transactions B.

Audio recordings of the meeting are now available below.

Organisers

  • Professor Alan Walker FRS, Penn State University, USA

    Alan Walker is Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Penn State University.  He is a palaeontologist who has carried our field and laboratory work on fossil and living primates with a view to extracting behaviour from fossils.  He studied the locomotion of living lemurs in order to retrodict the locomotion of the recently extinct giant lemurs of Madagascar, the microscopic wear on teeth to infer the dietary habits of extinct primates and hominids, and has recently collaborated with colleagues to understand the relationship between the size of semicircular canals and locomotion in order to discover the locomotor adaptations of extinct species without recourse to information from the limb skeleton.   He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow.  His book The Wisdom of Bones (with Pat Shipman) won the Rhône-Poulenc Prize in 1997. 

  • Professor Chris Stringer FRS, Natural History Museum, UK

    Professor Chris Stringer has worked at the Natural History Museum since 1973, and is now Research Leader in Human Origins and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His early research concentrated on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but through his work on the 'Recent African Origin' model, he now collaborates with archaeologists, dating specialists and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the evolution of modern humans globally. He has excavated at sites in Britain and abroad, directed the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB) for 13 years, and now co-directs the Pathways to Ancient Britain project (PAB). His recent books include The Origin of our Species (published in the USA as Lone Survivors, 2013) and Britain: one million years of the human story (with Rob Dinnis, 2014).