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Pleistocene Skull Reconstruction 

Race, Ancestry, and Populations in the Pleistocene and the Present

EvoS Seminar
5:15 PM
Monday April 13, 2020

About the Seminar

The last decade has seen remarkable advances in the availability of genetic evidence to inform understandings of the human condition. On a personal level, direct to consumer (DTC) genetic companies now offer a myriad of ways to examine an individual's genetic ancestry in ever more fine detail. In scientific studies of human evolution, genetic evidence drawn from ancient fossil material, or even in the absence of fossil material, have revealed an increasingly complex scenario for the origin of contemporary humans. Linking these two periods, the ancient past and the present, is the troublesome but central category of populations. Populations are a pivotal unit of evolutionary study, but also seldom clearly defined. The intrinsic complexity of human populations, and the casual nature in which they are evoked in practice, have allowed discredited ideas about the biological basis for human racial differences to re-emerge on the back of newly available genetic evidence. Using ancestry, and the evidence for human genetic ancestry extending back into the Pleistocene, as a backbone, I present an explanatory model for why our evolutionary past has not produced populations that conform to evolutionarily derived race-like patterns. Within this discussion I present a cautionary perspective on how science informs and describes patterns of human variation.

 

Adam van Arsdale

About the Speaker

Adam Van Arsdale is the Wellesley College Class of 1966 Associate Professor and chair of the Anthropology Department. A paleoanthropologist by training, much of Van Arsdale's work has focused on questions of Pleistocene hominin dispersal and morphological variation. Van Arsdale's early work was based on years of collaboration at the early Pleistocene site of Dmanisi, Georgia, the earliest well-dated hominin fossil site found outside of Africa, dating to 1.76 million years before present. Van Arsdale is currently the principal investigator of a National Geographic-funded survey project in south-central Kazakhstan, still with the aim of better understanding the constraints on and dynamics of hominin populations in the Pleistocene. Van Arsdale's research has always relied on the growing utilization of genetic data--first from contemporary populations, and more recently from ancient DNA--to better understand our evolutionary past. In part as an outgrowth of his teaching at Wellesley, this interest in how genetic data are incorporated into our understanding of the past has spread into more contemporary issues around personal genomic data, and is the basis for a current book project, "The Fuzzy Genome: Translating Information into Knowledge." Van Arsdale is currently the president of the Biological Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association and the co-associate editor for biological anthropology for American Anthropologist.

 

All are welcome. For more information, contact Dr. Rolf Quam, EvoS Director, rquam (@) binghamton.edu, or Susan Ryan, EvoS Coordinator, sryan (@) binghamton.edu

Last Updated: 12/4/20