Harvard Anthropology Seminar Series: Daniel Green (Harvard HEB)

Abstract

Climate is hypothesized to have driven multiple adaptive radiations in Africa over the last 20 million years, including that of our ancestors, the hominins. The association of climate with evolutionary process is difficult to evaluate however, since many climate proxies accumulate over long time frames and have uncertain relationships to fossils. Here, I'll show how chemical features of teeth — the densest tissues in our bodies — recover extraordinary details from the African past inhabited by primates and ultimately hominins. These include the intensities of monsoons and the lengths of dry seasons, and enigmatic niche spaces occupied by great apes similar to our ancestors. I'll also show how these fossils preserve evolutionary relationships through protein fragments as far back as 30 million years ago, in a persistently hot region previously thought less hospitable to paleoproteomic preservation.

Speaker Bio

Daniel R. Green directs the Kenya Summer Field Program in Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He received his PhD from Harvard in 2017, and then completed postdoctoral research at the medical-dental Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, and at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.