John Hawks, Anthropology, UW-Madison
Title: The Rising Star Expedition and the Discovery of Homo naledi

Prof. John Hawks will talk to us about recent discoveries that are shaping the knowledge of human origins. In 2013 he was part of a fieldwork team that recovered more than 1,200 hominin specimens from the Rising Star cave system in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, in an expedition led by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand. Publication of the results of this excavation in September of 2015 notes the discovery of a new species of hominin, Homo naledi.

Image Credit: Medium

John Hawks

John Hawks is Associate Chair of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-­Madison, an associate member of both the Department of Zoology and the J.F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution, and a recent recipient of the UW’s H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship and its Vilas Associate award. Prof. Hawks’ research focuses on human evolution, especially changes in natural selection on human populations, and his scholarly contributions have been internationally recognized. He starred in the recent PBS series “First Humans” (http://video.pbs.org/program/first­peoples/).

For more about John Hawks: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/

For Further Reading: http://news.wisc.edu/naledi/