Gibraltar. The Human Niche in Calpe Conference

The Gibraltar Museum, on behalf of the Government of Gibraltar, says the Calpe 2012 Conference will be held at the John Mackintosh Hall from the 13th to the 16th September. This will be the 16th in the series and, on this occasion, will cover an important aspect of human evolution.

It has been the tradition that a major international conference on this subject will be the Calpe conference every third year in the programme. This year’s conference promises to be a landmark meeting in which many of the world’s leading authorities will get together to discuss our state of knowledge. The conference promises to turn up some new facts, some indeed from the work being carried out in Gibraltar itself, and will have a significant bearing on how we see ourselves and our own future.

The programme brings together leading world researchers. Among them is Professor Ian Tattersall, Curator of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has worked widely with primates and is a leading expert on human fossils. Professor Richard Wrangham, who is Professor of Anthropology in Harvard University, began his career as a researcher at Jane Goodall’s long-term Common Chimpanzee field study in Gombe, Tanzania. He befriended fellow primatologist Dian Fossey and assisted her in setting up her non-profit mountain gorilla conservation organisation. Most recently, he has become associated with the hypothesis that cooking food was a central part and catalyst in our evolution.

Professor Gordon Orians of the University of Washington is a renowned conservation biologist and ornithologist and is Director Emeritus in the Board of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). He has most recently been instrumental in the development of the new field of environmental aesthetics, which will be the subject of his talk.

The programme, as has now become customary, includes Gibraltarian scientists working in the Gibraltar Museum.

The full list of speakers and the titles of their presentations is as follows:

Professor Jacques Blondel, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montpellier, France
The Holy Grail of the niche: from amoeba to humans

Professor Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA
Tachytely and Culture in Human Evolution

Professor John Hawks, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
Population dynamics of Pleistocene people from the perspective of ancient genomes

Professor Christoph Zollikofer and Professor Marcia Ponce de León, University of Zurich, Switzerland
The ecology of human morphology

Dr Richard Jennings, University College Cork, Ireland Hominin Life Zones of the Mid-latitude Belt'

Dr Geraldine Finlayson, The Gibraltar Museum The Habitat of Homo

Professor Doug Larson, University of Guelph, Canada From rock shelters to skyscrapers: thoughts on the evolution of the human habitat

Professor Richard Wrang-ham, Harvard University, USA Influences of cooking on behavioral ecology

Dr Jordi Rosell and Dr Ruth Blasco, IPHES, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain Diet, environment and human behaviour: a zooarchaeological approach

Dr Darren Fa, The Gibraltar Museum The old man and the Sea: the marine component of the human niche

Professor John Shea, Stony Brook University, New York, USA The Stone Cutting Edge: A Uniquely Hominin Strategy for Niche Widening

Dr Ignacio Martínez, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain Looking for the first speakers: the Atapuerca evidence

Dr Juan José Negro, Estación Biológica Doñana Use of feathers as signals in Homo species

Professor Gordon Orians, University of Washington, USA Our Ecological Mind: Ghosts of African Savannas

Professor Clive Finlayson, The Gibraltar Museum Surmountable Peaks and Fordable Valleys – Reflections on the Homo Adaptive Landscape

*The public is encouraged to attend the conference which will be free for local residents. For registration and further details please contact Mrs Marie Mosquera at the Gibraltar Museum on 200 74289 or on email musadmin@gibraltar.gi

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