Lunch Hour Lecture | Human Evolution in the Palaeolithic Age

About the lecture:

Human Evolution in the Palaeolithic Age

This talk reflects on 15 years of archaeological and conservation work at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, approached through the lens of material care and multidisciplinary inquiry. Olduvai, one of the most significant sites for understanding early human evolution, is renowned for its deep Palaeolithic record of fossils and stone tools. Central to this work is a collaborative framework that brings together archaeologists, conservators, paleoanthropologists, and other specialists, alongside sustained partnerships with the local community. Through close, cross-disciplinary analysis of the condition and surface modifications of faunal remains, the team uncovered fascinating findings, including compelling evidence that early hominins in East Africa were adapting stone knapping techniques to bone more than a million years earlier than previously believed. This discovery invites us to reconsider Palaeolithic animal fossils not merely as biological remnants, but as cultural artefacts shaped by our ancestors.

About the speaker:

Dr. Renata F. Peters is a conservator of archaeological collections and indigenous material culture, and has worked in sites in South and North America, Europe and Africa. She is Associate Professor in Conservation at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and specializes in biocultural materials and participatory approaches to museum-related decision-making. She is the head conservator of the ‘Olduvai Geochronology Archaeology Project’ (OGAP), a cross-disciplinary project in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania; and the PI of the research project 'Weaving Fibres of Resistance: Tikuna tree bark and identity in the Amazon', in the upper Solimoes River of the Brazilian Amazon.

About the chair:

Dr Andrew Garrard obtained a BSc in Zoology & Geology from Newcastle University (1971) and a PhD in Prehistoric Archaeology from Cambridge University (1981). He was appointed to the Assistant Directorship and then Directorship of the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History in Jordan between 1982-89. In 1990 he obtained a Lectureship and later a Readership at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL focusing on teaching and research in early prehistory. He has directed major survey and excavation projects relating to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic time periods in various areas of South-West Asia including Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey He has published extensively on themes relating to the transition from hunting and gathering to farming societies in this region between the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene, as well as on earlier Palaeolithic periods.