In this episode, Dr. Adam Van Arsdale (Wellesley College) gives us an overview of his duties as an Associate Professor and some of his paleoanthropoological research to date.

Adam has excavated and analyzed fossil material from the Lower Palaeolithic site of Dmanisi, Georgia. Here, we have some of the earliest fossil hominins outside of the African continent, daying to approximately 1.8 million years ago. Currently, Adam is also engaged in preliminary investigations of the steppic environment and previous demographic structure of hominin populations in South-Central Kazakhstan.

Adam is also a big advocate for integrative and interdisciplinary anthropology, as well as science communication. Increasingly, ancient DNA evidence, fossil finds and archaeological material are giving anthropologists a complex understanding of the human past and concepts such as ancestry, race and human evolution. On the player below, click ‘Play’ to hear what Adam has to say about how we can best combine these various strands of evidence and communicate them to broader publics.

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Show notes

If you have feedback or questions for Adam, you can find him on Twitter and read his blog The Pleistocene Scene. Recently, Adam also recorded a podcast series (“Running for Science: Science for Running”) in conjunction with his own training for his first-ever Boston marathon, featuring the work of researchers in biomechanics, energetics, neurobiology and anthropology.

You can find Michael on Twitter and Instagram too.

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