Department of Anthropology | University of Waterloo

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Anthropology 2009-2010 Guest Lecture Series

The Department of Anthropology will be hosting a lecture

by Dr. J.W.K. Harris,

Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University,

entitled

Our Earliest Hominin Ancestors, Bipedalism and Tools: new insights into human origins on the African continent

on Wednesday, March 10, 7-8:30 pm in PAS 2083

as part of its 2009-10 Guest Lecture Series.

ALL WELCOME TO ATTEND

Professor Harris draws on his fieldwork in East Africa over the last 40 years to focus on early hominin behavior 6 million to 1 million years ago. In particular, he addresses questions on the linkages between changes in hominin evolution and the paleo environment, why stone tools are important indications of ranging behaviors and diet, and what can studies of non-human primates tell us about our earliest hominin ancestors. Recently (Nov 2009) Professor Harris traveled to Guinea to study free ranging chimpanzees that use stone tools.

Please see Anthropology Events for more information about our 2009-2010 Guest Lecture series

From A.L. Kroeber (1948) "Anthropology" p. 11. Harcourt and Brace, New York.:

Of all the social sciences, anthropology is perhaps the most distinctively culture-conscious. It aims to investigate human culture as such: at all times, everywhere, in all its parts and aspects and workings. It looks for generalized findings as to how culture operates—literally, how human beings behave under given cultural conditions—and for the major developments of the history of culture. …Now while some of the interest of anthropology in its earlier stages was in the exotic and the out-of-the-way, yet even this antiquarian motivation ultimately contributed to a broader result. Anthropologists became aware of the diversity of culture. They began to see the tremendous range of its variations. From that, they commenced to envisage it as a totality, as no historian of one period or of a single people was ever likely to do, nor any analyst of his own type of civilization alone. They became aware of culture as a "universe," or vast field, in which we of today and our own civilization occupy only one place of many. The result was a widening of a fundamental point of view, a departure from unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity. This shift from naïve self-centeredness in one's own time and spot to a broader view based on objective comparison is somewhat like the change from the original geocentric assumption of astronomy to the Copernican interpretation of the solar system and the subsequent still greater widening to a universe of galaxies.