Stony Brook Highlights Distinguished Anthropologists in February Provost’s Lecture

The Provost's Lecture Series will highlight two of Stony Brook University's SUNY Distinguished Service Professors on Tuesday, February 11.

Anthropologists Lawrence Martin and Pat Wright will each give a brief lecture about their work and its significance.

The event starts at 3:30 pm in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater and will be followed by a reception with light refreshments. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

Add the lecture to your calendar

Becoming Human: Our Seven-Million-Year Journey
Lawrence Martin
SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Anthropology
Director emeritus, Turkana Basin Institute

All of the major events in the human evolutionary story occurred in Africa and are recorded in the sedimentary rocks of Africa, particularly the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia.

Martin, an expert on the evolution of apes and the origin of humans, worked with the late Richard Leakey to build a bastion for research on human evolution, Stony Brook's Turkana Basin Institute, that he directed for 17 years. His talk will explore the knowledge acquired over 50 years of research in the Turkana Basin and will tell the seven-million-year story of how we became human.

Seven million years ago, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans shared a common ancestor before they went on their separate evolutionary journeys. For the first five million years of the existence of the lineage of hominids that ultimately became us, the human story is exclusively African. There is no fossil or archaeological evidence for human ancestors anywhere in Europe, Asia, Australasia or the Americas until the last two million years of our journey. While several other species of Homo existed in Europe and Asia over the last two million years none of these evolved into Homo sapiens. Evidence from DNA shows that all human beings alive today share a recent, common ancestry within Africa. Today humans comprise over seven billion people living on every continent other than Antarctica, but this hasn't been the case for long.

Recent Discoveries Enlighten the Mysteries of Madagascar: Earlier Human Arrival, the Lost Rainforest and Ranomafana Hippos
Pat Wright
SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Anthropology
Director, Centre ValBio

Our Stony Brook team has made three major discoveries in Madagascar in the last decade that have given us new findings to understand its mysterious past. Madagascar has been isolated from any continent for over 100 million years. With no fossil record from 77 million years (dinosaurs) until the Holocene, there are many questions about the evolution of the living animals. Today Madagascar has a rich and biodiverse fauna which is on the brink of extinction. We do know that a large ecosystem of megafauna including giant lemurs the size of gorillas, elephant birds three meters tall, dwarfed hippopotami, giant carnivores and horned crocodiles were driven to extinction a thousand years ago, but we have to rely on DNA to interpret their arrival times onto Madagascar. We know that the first humans arrived from Indonesia 2,500 years ago. The biggest mystery is how so many habitats and animals could have been destroyed in only 2,000 years after the earliest humans arrived.

A recent clue comes from near the sapphire mines in central Madagascar, where our Stony Brook team found fossils dated definitively at 10,000 years ago. In 2017 we published findings of toolmarks on the giant 10 foot tall elephant bird bones and also hippos from the same ecosystem in the middle of Madagascar. Who were those humans that arrived 10,000 years ago, hunting the megafauna, and where were their origins? In 2016, our Stony Brook team discovered a remote rainforest in the center of Madagascar with new species as well as species from the four corners of Madagascar implying that the island now with 80% of the natural habitat destroyed, was once all forested. Then in November 2024, our Stony Brook team made a miraculous discovery within the most pristine area of Ranomafana National Park. A cranium mandible. Teeth and leg bones of the dwarf hippo were discovered in a cave inside the rainforest. Fossils rarely are found in rainforest, and this hippo, although not dated yet, is not fully fossilized. Wright will put all these recent discoveries into perspective to better understand the history of Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, and propose a way to save its rapidly disappearing fauna and flora into the future.