Paleoecologist and biological anthropologist, Daniel R. Green, will present this year’s Grace Kimball Memorial Lecture, “Chemical Paleontology: Paleoclimate and Evolution from the East African Rift System,” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 18, in Stark Learning Center 105. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Global cooling over the past 50 million years has transformed Earth’s ecology. In Africa, increasingly open landscapes saw the adaptive radiation of our hominin ancestors alongside other clades.
What do new geochemical (stable isotope) records from teeth tell us about how African fauna responded to interchange with Eurasia, aridification and increased seasonality? Why do teeth provide unique records of temporally fine-scaled climatic and behavioral processes? And how did primates and human ancestors thrive in changing African landscapes?
Lastly, can the special properties of fossilized teeth extend tropical paleoproteomics further back in time, resolving uncertainties not only in the ecological regimes that framed evolution, but in evolutionary history itself?
Green will address all of these pressing and fascinating topics in a lecture lasting about 50 minutes, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Green is a paleoecologist and biological anthropologist who studies the environmental context of primate and human evolution in Africa. He directs the Kenya Field Program at Harvard University, and is a permanent lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.
His studies and research have been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Center at Columbia University, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of Science, the U.S. National Institute of Health, the Forsyth Institute, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Harvard University Committee on African Studies. He has had his work published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Integrative and Comparative Biology, PLoS ONE and Frontiers in Physiology, among others.
The Kimball Lecture is named for Grace Kimball, former professor of microbiology at Wilkes University. Lecturers are chosen by Wilkes University biology faculty as scientists who have distinguished themselves in evolutionary biology.
For more information, visit wilkes.edu/kimball.