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Arts & Sciences is sponsoring the "Conversations," which are free and open to the public, as part of the university's 150th anniversary celebration. The "Modern Human Origins" Conversation will be held from 10 to 11:30 a.m. in Graham Chapel. Fred H. Smith, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago, will moderate the event. A human paleontologist, Smith is a leading expert on European Neandertals and the origin of modern people. Other scholars participating in the Conversation include Washington University's Anne M. Bowcock, Ph.D., professor of genetics, of pediatrics and of medicine in the School of Medicine; population and evolutionary biologist Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences; and biological anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences.
"The emergence and spread of early modern humans in the Late Pleistocene Epoch Ñ between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago Ñ have captured the academic and public imagination because this was the time period for the full establishment of modern human biology and cultural adaptations," said Trinkaus, who helped organize the Conversation and is considered one of the world's most influential scholars of Neandertal biology and evolution. "Its consideration therefore addresses issues of modern human ancestry and the meaning of being human. This Conversation will focus on these concerns from the three perspectives that shed light on the subject: the human fossil record, the Paleolithic archaeological record, and past and present human molecular variation." For more information, call 935-7304. |
Some
of the world's top scholars on modern human origins will gather
March 26 at Washington University in St. Louis for the last of a
four-part series of "Conversations" on key issues that will affect
the future of the university, the community and the world. 
The
other human origins Conversation participants are: Paleolithic archeologist
Catherine Perlès, Ph.D., professor of prehistory at the Université
de Paris X-Nanterre; human paleontologist Chris Stringer, Ph.D.,
professor and Merit researcher at London's Natural History Museum;
and Paleolithic archeologist João Zilhão, Ph.D., professor
in the Department of Archaeology at the Universidade de Lisboa,
Portugal, and a Humboldt Fellow at the Universität zu Köln,
Germany, this year.