The Role of Cultural Expression in Human Evolution

Renowned paleoanthropologist, politician, and environmentalist, Richard Leakey has been making international headlines for more than 40 years and was included in TIME’s 100 Greatest Minds of the 20th Century. He is Chairman of the Board of the Turkana Basin Institute and former Director of the Kenya National Museums and the Kenya Wildlife Service. His field work at Lake Natron on the Kenya-Tanzania border, in the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia, and all around Lake Turkana in Kenya, yielded a treasure trove of hominid fossils that has provided much of the paleontological record on which our understanding of human evolution is based. On the insistence of international donor organizations, from 1999 to 2001, Leakey served as cabinet secretary and head of the Kenyan civil service. He has recently founded WildlifeDirect, an online conservation service of the world’s most endangered species and is author of over 100 articles and books, including The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and The Future of Humankind, Leakey examined the five great catastrophic extinctions in the history of the planet.

This evening talk is part of the Stony Brook University Turkana Basin Institute’s 6th Human Evolution Workshop chaired by Dr. Leakey and hosted by Watermill Community Board Member Michael Braverman. The workshop brings together 22 scientists from five countries to discuss the causes and consequences of prehistoric changes in food, technology, and social life in the Turkana Basin and compare them to contemporaneous changes in other regions of Africa.