Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
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Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
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.
Dr Laura Gruss, Radford University, USA
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Dr Laura Gruss, Radford University, USA
Dr Laura Gruss, Radford University, USA
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.
Professor Mark Maslin, University College London, UK
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Professor Mark Maslin, University College London, UK
Professor Mark Maslin, University College London, UK
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.
Primate pelvic anatomy and implications for birth
Professor Wenda Trevathan, New Mexico State University, USA
Abstract
The pelvis performs two major functions for terrestrial mammals. It provides somewhat rigid support for muscles engaged in locomotion and, for females, it serves as the birth canal. The result for many species, and especially for encephalized primates, is an “obstetric dilemma” whereby the neonate often has to negotiate a tight squeeze in order to be born. For most monkey species, birth is a challenge that occasionally results in death when the size of the neonate is too large to successfully deliver. (Great ape females have spacious birth canals and give birth to small neonates, providing an exception to the pattern of difficult births in primates.) On top of what was probably a baseline of challenging birth, locomotor changes in the human lineage resulted in even more potential complications. Few adaptations in human evolution have had greater impact on human biology and culture than bipedalism. Almost every part of the human skeleton was altered, as well as aspects of cardiovascular, circulatory, respiratory and endocrine function. One of the most profound changes occurred in the birth process and the state of infant development at the time of birth. Negotiation of the bipedal pelvis requires a series of rotations, the end of which has the infant emerging from the birth canal facing the opposite direction from the mother. This pattern, strikingly different from what is typically seen in monkeys and apes, places a premium on having assistance at delivery. Furthermore, due to constraints provided by maternal metabolic limits to gestating the energetically expensive human fetus, as well as anatomical, placental, and immunological factors, human infants are born with slightly more than a quarter of the brain size they will achieve in adulthood, approximately half that of most other primates. The high degree of dependency at birth and an inordinately slow rate of growth of human infants and children place demands on mothers and other caretakers that appear to far exceed those of other mammals, including our closest primate relatives.
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Professor Wenda Trevathan, New Mexico State University, USA
Professor Wenda Trevathan, New Mexico State University, USA
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.