Early Humans; Meet the Ancestors - FREE lecture
You are invited to join Dr Simon Clarke as he delivers this lecture by video conference on Monday 31 January 2011 at Lerwick, Ness, Brae and Unst Learning Centres from 7.00pm to 8.30pm.
The first FREE lecture will outline the subject by establishing a basic timeline, introducing the main sources of archaeological evidence and setting out the kinds of questions researchers are trying to answer.
Hopefully this will whet your appetite for a more detailed exploration of the individual species. Some like Australopithecus are more ape-like; in appearance, intellectual capability and behaviour. Others like Neanderthals actually had larger brains than some of us. They wore clothes, buried their dead in formal graves and were genetically close enough to have perhaps interbred with the anatomically modern humans they encountered over a period of tens of thousands of years.
Beyond skeletal remains we will be considering the artefacts and ecofacts; the landscapes they inhabited, the animals they exploited and that preyed upon them, the tools they made. I will be setting out a story of survival and adaptation stretching back 10 million years and ranging from geographically from sub-Saharan Africa to Eurasia, Australia, the Americas and the island chains of the Pacific. We can make sophisticated inferences about our ancestors’ place in the ecosystem, their likely mating patterns, the development of language, art and religion. This in turn raises interesting ideas about what it is to be human and where evolutionary forces might take our species in the future.
No prior specialist knowledge is required, just a spirit of enquiry.
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