Human Evolution: brain, birthweight and the immune system

Jean-Jacques Hublin, Ph.D., started his career at the French CNRS, before being hired as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bordeaux. Since 2004 he has been a Professor and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), where he founded the Department of Human Evolution. He has been a pioneer in the development of virtual paleoanthropology. His main research interests address the processes associated with the emergence of Neandertals and modern humans. He is the main proponent of the ‘accretion model’ for Neandertal origins. He also spearheaded the studies related to interactions between Neandertals and modern humans in Europe. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Europe and North Africa. Professor Hublin is the president of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE), founded in 2011.

Since earning my Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy from Duke University in 2005, I have taught Anatomy, Physiology, Biomechanics, and Human Evolution at Benedictine University in Illinois and at Radford University in Virginia, where I am now an Assistant Professor in the Biology Department. My research focuses on the evolution of human walking.  In order to make inferences about the way our ancestors moved and the different selective pressures that may have been acting on their locomotor anatomy and behavior, I study the biomechanics of walking in modern human subjects using video, a force plate, and movement analysis software.  For example, I have studied how locomotor biomechanics would have changed as the body proportions of our ancestors evolved during the last two million years, and how different ways of carrying a baby (in the arms, in a sling) affect the mechanics of walking in modern and prehistoric women.

Mark Maslin FRGS, FRSA is a Professor of Climatology at University College London. He is a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, Executive Director of Rezatec Ltd and Director of The London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership. Maslin is a leading scientist with particular expertise in past global and regional climatic change and has publish over 120 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and The Lancet.  He has been PI or Co-I on grants worth over £43 million. His areas of scientific expertise include causes of past and future global climate change and its effects on the global carbon cycle, biodiversity, rainforests and human evolution. Professor Maslin has presented over 45 public talks over the last three years. He has also have written 8 popular books, over 30 popular articles (e.g., for New Scientist, The Times, Independent and Guardian), appeared on radio and television (including Timeteam, Newsnight, Dispatches, Horizon, The Today Programme, Material World, BBC News, Channel 5 News, and Sky News. Maslin's popular book “Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction” by Oxford University Press has sold over 40,000 copies. He has subsequently published another title “Climate: A Very Short Introduction” in the same series. He was included in Who’s Who for the first time in 2009 and was granted a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for the study of early human evolution in East Africa in 2011.

Wenda R. Trevathan is Regents Professor (Emerita) of Anthropology at New Mexico State University and a biological anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Her research focuses on the evolutionary and biocultural factors underlying human reproduction including childbirth, maternal behavior, sexuality, and menopause.  Her primary publications include works on the evolution of childbirth and evolutionary medicine.  She is the author of Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives:  How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health (Oxford, 2010) and co-editor of two collections on evolutionary medicine (Oxford, 1999 and 2008).   The recipient of several awards including the W. W. Howells Book Award (for Ancient Bodies) and the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, she currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Anthropologist, the Journal of Evolutionary Medicine, and Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.

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Jonathan CK Wells is Professor of Anthropology and Pediatric Nutrition at UCL Institute of Child Health, London. He conducts research on the associations between growth and development and health outcomes in later life, as well as on a variety of pediatric disease states. He is involved in a number of longitudinal studies of growth and development in South America (Brazil), Africa (Ethiopia) and South Asia (India, Nepal), where he investigates growth and development from a trans-generational perspective. These studies highlight the importance of body composition as a marker both of early under-nutrition, and of longer-term chronic disease risk. To aid in the interpretation of these studies, he uses an evolutionary perspective which focuses on nutritional dynamics between parents and their offspring. His publications include The evolutionary biology of human body fatness (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Dr. Moore’s research has pioneered the use of high altitude as a natural laboratory for studying the maternal factors underlying the pregnancy complications of fetal growth restriction and preeclampsia, both of which are more common at high altitude.  Using the variation in generations of high-altitude residence present on three continents, her studies in Colorado have shown that chronic hypoxia blunts the normal pregnancy increase in uterine artery blood flow but that multigenerational (Andean, Tibetan) populations are protected from such reductions as well as (largely) from hypoxia-induced fetal growth restriction.  Using genome scans, her group has shown that natural selection has operated on selected genes in these populations.  Continuing studies are focusing on the genes involved and the mechanisms whereby they influence maternal uterine artery blood flow responses to pregnancy.

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Anthony M. Carter is Emeritus Reader at the Institute for Molecular Medicine, University of Southern Denmark. He was educated at Latymer Upper School and Magdalene College Cambridge and received his doctorate from the University of Lund, Sweden. He has served as Dean of Medicine at the University of Southern Denmark and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Toronto and Western Ontario. He is Adjunct Curator of the Harland W. Mossman Collection at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum. His research has encompassed placental circulation, placental gas exchange, fetal endocrinology and the control of fetal growth. In recent years he has focused on comparative studies of the mammalian placenta and the evolution of placentation. He is currently Editor of Trophoblast Research, which appears as a supplement to Placenta.

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Derek Wildman, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at the Wayne State University School of Medicine (Detroit, Michigan USA). His past and current research relies upon molecular evolutionary and comparative genomic techniques to study the evolution of mammalian pregnancy with a long-term goal of accurately describing the evolutionary events that led to the diversity of forms of placentation in mammals. Dr. Wildman also studies the evolution the human brain’s extended period of adaptive plasticity. He has authored or co-authored approximately 80 publications. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Human Evolution.

Growing up in London, Peter Parham studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and then went as a Kennedy Scholar to Harvard University, where he obtained a PhD for structural studies on HLA class I performed in Jack Strominger’s laboratory. As a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows Parham spent a year in Walter Bodmer’s group at Oxford University, where with Frances Brodsky he developed monoclonal antibodies against HLA class I and II. Peter Parham joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1980, where he is now Professor of Structural Biology and Microbiology & Immunology. Parham’s research concentrates on the genetics and evolution of MHC class I polymorphisms and their functional interactions with rapidly evolving and comparably polymorphic lymphocyte receptors. Peter Parham has received the Rose Payne, Ceppellini and Festenstein Awards for Immunogenetics, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.  

Azim Surani was born in Kenya, and obtained his PhD in 1975 at Cambridge University under Professor Sir Robert Edwards FRS (Nobel Laureate, 2010). Surani established his first research group at the Babraham Institute in 1979, where he discovered the phenomenon of Genomic Imprinting in 1984. He went onto identify several novel imprinted genes and their functions, and contributed to the mechanism of imprinting involving the erasure and re-establishment of DNA methylation. He returned to the University of Cambridge as the Marshall-Walton Professor at the Wellcome Trust Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, where he is currently Director of Germline and Epigenomics Research. His work over the past twelve years has helped to elucidate the genetic basis for mammalian germ cell specification, and its intimate link with the initiation of the unique and extensive epigenetic reprogramming towards generating the totipotent state.

Professor Gudrun Moore has made an internationally-acclaimed contribution to the molecular genetics of major complications of pregnancy and fetal malformation, particularly cleft palate and most recently the somatic gene mutation for Congenital melanocytic naevi and Lenz-Majewski syndrome. She has applied genetic and epigenetic techniques to the study of fetal growth restriction using Silver Russell syndrome (SRS) as an exemplar. Her finding of limited conservation of genomic imprinting between mice and humans in placental gene expression demonstrated that studies in humans are vital for a complete picture of the evolutionary consequences of genomic imprinting as it relates to human disease particularly birth weight health outcomes. Her unique contribution to maternal, fetal and child health will be recognised for years to come through her establishment of the Wellbeing-of-Women-funded “Baby Bio Bank” with Professor Regan (Imperial College London). This national epidemiological and biological resource will facilitate research into complications of pregnancy, enabling development of new diagnostic and therapeutic measures. She is currently the Deputy Director for Research for the UCL-Institute of Child Health and Chief Scientific Advisor for the medical charity, Sparks.