Nobel Conference

Gustavus Adolphus hosted the 44^th Annual Nobel Conference

Who Were the First Humans?

October 7-8, 2008

Five Alliance coordinators, three faculty, and X students attended this year’s Nobel Conference. North Star STEM students and faculty participated from Century College, Carleton College, St. Cloud State University, the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities and Anoka Ramsey Community College, as well as students from the host college, Gustavus Adolphus College. We enjoyed listening to lectures by top researchers in the field of physical and cultural anthropology and genetics presenting on Who Were the First Humans?

Curtis Marean, Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, Tempe, presented on the African evidence for the origins of modern human behavior. He described research on communities of early humans living in coastal South Africa in relation to climatic change between 400,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig presented on the paleogenetics of Neanderthals in relation to chimpanzee DNA and human DNA, further delineating the rise and decline of Neaderthals.

Marcus Feldman of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford presented on his use of applied mathematics and computer modeling to understand the evolution of modern humans. He analyzes variations in DNA in order to trace and distinguish human migration patterns.

Dennis Stanford, head of Archeology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, presented on his studies of migration patterns to North America, postulating that the first humans in North America came by way of the northern Atlantic from southern France and Northern Spain.

Robin Dunbar of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University presented on the development of socialization among humans. He proposes the Social Brain Hypothesis which relates social complexity to brain size. The ability to conceptualize the relationships among other people’s points of view—called intentionality—is an attribute of a large brain and distinguishes humans from other large apes.

J. Wentzel van Huyssteen of Princeton Theological Seminary, presented on the uniqueness of humans from the perspective of theological anthropology by comparing Biblical materials to scientific understandings of early humans from paleoanthropology and genetics.

These presentations—very much worth watching—are available on the Gustavus Adolphus web site.