Description: 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 1200 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.

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/first-peoples/).

Archaeological Institute of America-Milwaukee Society General Information:  
NOTE – CHANGE OF VENUE: Physics Building, Room 137
All lectures are held on Sunday afternoons at 3:00 p.m. in Sabin Hall Room G90 on the UWM Campus (3413 North Downer, corner of Newport and Downer Avenues). On Sundays, parking is available in the Klotsche Center surface lot directly north of Sabin or on nearby streets.

All lectures are free and open to the public and followed by refreshments. They are co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Foreign Languages and Literature-Classics, and Art History at UW-Milwaukee.