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Seminar 2008

Intimate relations: human evolution and the environment
Professor Robert Foley

There is little doubt that human lifestyles and activities are now having a major effect on the planet's environment, at scales from the microbial to the global. The result, it is becoming increasingly clear, is both climatic change and loss of biodiversity. However, it is perhaps important to remember that even 10,000 years ago it would have been very hard to discern any effect of humans on their environment, and prior to the emergence of Homo sapiens in the last 200,000 years, none at all. Indeed, for virtually all our evolutionary history humans have been at the mercy of naturally changing climates and environments, and have been an integral part of evolving patterns of biodiversity. In this talk Robert Foley explored human evolution in terms of the role that climatic change has played in determining its course, and tried to consider when and why the relationship between humans and their environment changed, and how this fits with the pattern of terrestrial evolution.

Robert Foley is Leverhulme Research Professor of Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies. He is also a Fellow of King's College Cambridge. He was trained in Palaeolithic archaeology (MA, Ph.D.) at Cambridge. From 1977 he was at the University of Durham, before returning to Cambridge in 1986. In 2001 he co-founded, with Marta Mirazon Lahr, the Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University. His research has covered a wide range of problems in human evolution, from the earliest history of the lineage to the evolution of human diversity. Underlying this research has been a focus on ecology and the role of the environment in shaping our species. He has published over 100 papers on human evolution and prehistory, as well as a number of books, including Hominid Evolution and Community Ecology (1984), Another Unique Species (1987), The Origins of Human Behaviour (1991), Humans Before Humanity (1996), and Genes, Fossils and Behaviour (2001), and Principles of Human Evolution (2003).

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