Judy Holmes
(315) 443-2201
Syracuse University earth sciences professor Chris Scholz will present “The Environmental Background of Our Early Ancestors: East African Mega Droughts and the Migrations of Early Modern Humans” Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 4 p.m. in the Life Sciences Complex Lundgren Room (Room 106). The lecture, presented by Syracuse Symposium 2008, is free and open to the public.
Intended for a broad interdisciplinary audience, the lecture will focus on the results of recent scientific drilling in Africa’s Great Lakes. These international, interdisciplinary projects are providing the first long-duration, high-precision climate histories in localities where modern human species first emerged.
Scholz’s current research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, involves reconstructing the past climates of tropical Africa from sediments found in the lakes of East Africa’s Great Rift Valley. In 2005, he led an international team of researchers on a scientific drilling expedition to Lake Malawi-one of the world’s largest, deepest and oldest lakes. The team recovered continuous sediment cores from more than 1,200 feet below the lake bottom.
The first results of the Lake Malawi Drilling Project were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where the team reported on a series of mega droughts that prevailed in tropical Africa between 150,000 and 70,000 years ago. These episodes of severe climate variability are thought to have impacted the migration of early modern humans and the ultimate exodus of Homo sapiens from the African continent. The climate moderation that followed the series of mega droughts may also have enabled the dramatic population expansion known to have occurred at about that time.
Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining, and creating, presented by The College of Arts and Sciences to the entire Syracuse community. The fall 2008 symposium theme is migration. Further information about the symposium is available on the Web at http://syracusesymposium.org.
Scott Landes, associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School, was quoted in The Washington Post story “People with disabilities desperately need the vaccine. But states disagree on when they’ll get it.” Landes, an expert on the sociology of disability,…
Roy Gutterman, associate professor of magazine, news and digital journalism in the Newhouse School and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, was interviewed for the WAER story “SU Professor says President’s Closed Social Media Accounts Fall Under Big…
Roy Gutterman, associate professor of magazine, news and digital journalism in the Newhouse School and director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, was quoted in the CNN story “First Amendment doesn’t guarantee you the rights you think it does.”…
Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, was interviewed for the Time Magazine story “Big Tech’s Crackdown on Donald Trump and Parler Won’t Fix the Real Problem With Social Media.”…
Danielle Smith, professor of African American studies in the College of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, wrote an op-ed for History News Network titled “Images of the Capitol Riot Reflect a National Crisis.”…
If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.
