Dr. Jayne Wilkins, Department of Archaeology, will present a Science Faculty special research seminar with a talk entitled, "How South African environments shaped us: The origins and evolution of Homo sapiens". 

Abstract: The relationship between climate change and the origins of Homo sapiens is at the forefront of paleoanthropological research today. South Africa has a rich Pleistocene record documenting the origins of our species and its environmental context. I will present results from my research on the south coast at Pinnacle Point and Vleesbaai, near Mossel Bay that shows how early humans were resilient in the face of Pleistocene climate change, not only surviving but thriving before, during, and after the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago. This body of work contributes to the coastal adaptation hypothesis, which proposes that adaptation to changing shorelines and resource availabilities during the Pleistocene was a key factor in the emergence of modern human innovativeness, cooperation, and territoriality. That said, the intensity of research on coastal records for this time period has so far outweighed that on the deep interior record, which makes adequately testing the coastal adaptation hypothesis based on current evidence impossible. Furthermore, new research is challenging the single region hypothesis for human origins and rather supports a poly-centric, Pan-African origin in diverse environments across the continent. I will discuss how my current research trajectory is expanding the narrative of modern human origins in South Africa away from the coast to investigate early modern humans in the southern Kalahari Basin, providing new insights into a poorly known area of human evolution research. 

Biography: Dr. Jayne Wilkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Deputy Director of the Human Evolution Research Institute at the University of Cape Town. Her research seeks to understand the origins and evolution of Homo sapiens, through archaeological excavation, stone tool analysis, and experimental archaeology. Dr. Wilkins joined UCT in 2015, after completing a post-doctoral research position with the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University, and her PhD (2013) in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She created and leads the North of Kuruman Palaeoarchaeology Project, which has received funding from the National Geographic Society, and the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences.