The year 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and the 200th anniversary of his birth. Rutgers’
Center for Human Evolutionary Studies marks this occasion through its many approaches to understanding human beings with evolutionary theory as its guiding principle. The center is one of the world’s leading research, teaching, and student training programs in the evolution of human behavior.
“There is no other program like ours in the world where there are top-notch people taking genetic approaches, looking at the nonhuman primate, analyzing modern human behavior, investigating prehistory and fossil hominids, and reconstructing the environments and ecosystems in which those hominids lived,” said Rob Blumenschine, director of the center.
The Center for Human Evolutionary studies is the research arm of the Department of Anthropology's Evolutionary Anthropology graduate program. The department is part of Rutgers' School of Arts and Sciences.
Membership in the center includes celebrated scholars and theorists, such as Robert Trivers and Lionel Tiger, and new generations of researchers extracting fresh knowledge from ancient stones and bones or extinct and modern animals.
The list is long and distinguished but here we have selected five members to represent the center with more detailed accounts of their work.
Featured member profiles:
Robert Blumenschine is interested in the evolution of human diet and subsistence strategies, and has conducted archaeological and wildlife research in India and East and southern Africa.
Craig Feibel is interested in the environmental context of human evolution with a special focus on the Turkana Basin of Kenya and Ethiopia and its rich evolutionary record spanning more than 8 million years.
John W.K. Harris studies the earliest stages of human origins, specifically in the 1.5 to 2.5 million year time range when the genus Homo and the first stone tools appear and populations extend into Eurasia.
Ryne Palombit’s research focuses on the extraordinary diversity of social and mating strategies in animals (both human and nonhuman), and how those strategies have evolved.
Robert Scott has been in the field in Turkey, investigating the possible migration of fossil apes in and out of Africa during the Miocene epoch. He also works with minute traces of wear on tooth surfaces that serve as a basis to make inferences about the diet of ancient primates.
The other distinguished center members:
Susan Cachel studies the evolution of humans and other primates, the origins of human intelligence and sociality, evolutionary processes, and the relationship between form and function in an adaptive and evolutionary context.
Chi-hua Chiu continues to use research that integrates molecular and developmental evolution in order to understand how body plans develop and evolve over time.
Lee Cronk is developing an approach to the study of human behavior that incorporates both evolutionary theory and the concept of culture.
Helen Fisher has been on the national and international lecture circuit since l983 discussing the evolution of human sexuality, romantic love, marriage and divorce, gender differences, and the future of men and women in business and family life.
Carmel Schrire has worked and published on the archaeology of Australia, Mauritius, and South Africa, and in fields that include archaeological sequences, hunter-
gatherer behavior, history, ethnography, fiction, and poetry.
Lionel Tiger continues his multifaceted research that develops evolutionary perspectives on human behavior and institutions in industrial and postindustrial society.
Robert Trivers has spent his career investigating the theoretical basis of social behavior in organisms. His theories regarding parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and parent-offspring conflict have been hugely influential in a number of fields.
Cultural anthropologists will be featured in a companion Research Highlights in the spring.
