![]() ![]() It's an absolute pleasure to share my passion for human history, human evolution, and, believe it or not, teeth. Thank you, everyone, for joining me tonight. So let me get off this stand and welcome Dr. On a personal note, I would also say I really admire her personal dedication to the advancement of women in science, and mentoring her graduate students and others, which I know she takes very seriously, and which I really admire in the work you do. Her work has been published in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and highlighted in many public venues, including the New York Times, National Geographic, Nature, Science, Smithsonian, and Discovery magazines as well as through NPR, PBS, History Channel, Voice of America, and BBC broadcast media- i.e., she's everywhere. Tanya's research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for anthropological research. Teeth preserve remarkably faithful records, as we will hear, of the daily growth and infant diet, as well as stress experienced during birth, for many millions of years. ![]() She explores the evolution and development of human dentition. Her research has helped to identify the origins of a fundamental human adaptation- the costly yet advantageous shift from a "live fast, die young" strategy to the "live slow and grow old" strategy- that has helped to make us one of the most successful mammals on the planet. She received her BS in biology from the State University of New York and her doctorate in anthropological sciences from Stony Brook University in 2004. She arrived here at Harvard in 2008 after fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, where she co-founded the Dental Tissues Working Group in the Department of Human Evolution there. Tanya Smith, who is an associate professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology here at Harvard, and specializes in living and fossil human and primate tooth development and structure. It's a huge pleasure, as I said, to welcome Dr. Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History Smith, Associate Professor, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University ![]() It might seem that our development is invisible in the fossil record, but much can be learned from the faithful records of birth and growth embedded in teeth. Tanya Smith will discuss how she studies fossil teeth with state-of-the-art technologies to gain virtual access to these records and share what this research reveals about differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and about our evolution over the past seven million years. Modern humans and our closest-living ape relatives differ in developmental and reproductive biology, as well as in lifespans, but evolutionary anthropologists do not know when these distinctive characteristics evolved. See also: Public Lectures, Evolution, Asia, Europe ![]()
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