Speaker: Brian Villmoare Ph.D.

In the seventh installment of the weekly Proseminar Series, hosted by the Department of Anthropology, our own Brian Villmoare will be discussing the evolution of Homo and Paranthropus. 

Although human evolution is often presented as a steady progression towards anatomical modernity over the last 6-7 million years, the actual fossil records presents us with multiple and dramatically different versions of what it means to be ‘human’. One of the most interesting and important expressions of this pattern occurred some 2.5-3.0 million years ago with the appearance of two divergent genera: Homo and Paranthropus.

Both appear just as the widespread and long-lives species Australopithecus afarensis makes its last appearance in the fossil record.  He will talk about parallel tracks of research that help us understand why natural selection would generate two adaptively distinct, yet highly successful forms of Pleistocene hominin.

Recent fossil discoveries have helped us identify the time, place and circumstance of this divergence, and Villmoare discusses recent discoveries in the Afar region of Ethiopia. However, laboratory research on the patterns of evolutionary interdependence of craniofacial anatomy is also critical for helping us understand how these two forms were able to evolve under the selection pressures of the early Pleistocene.