Dr. Karen Kramer, Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and UNM Anthropology PhD (1998) will present the 47th JAR Distinguished Lecture on Thursday, October 25 at 7:30 pm in Anthropology Lecture Hall 163. Her talk is entitled "How There Got to Be so Many of Us: The Evolutionary Story of Population Growth and a Human Life History of Cooperation" and is free and open to the public.  

The following day, Dr. Kramer will present a Specialized Seminar, "Intergenerational Cooperation, Parenting and Childhood" Friday, October 26, 2018, at 12:00 Noon in Anthropology Rm. 248.

Lecture Abstract: One of the characteristics that defines humans is our amazing demographic success. The capacity for population growth has profound effects on peoples lives today, but it is also one of the remarkable stories of our evolutionary history. My talk will focus on how evolved changes in the human diet, life history and cooperation are linked in a kind of brilliant strategy that gives humans their demographic edge and has made us incredibly successful as a species. Following an overview of these evolutionary changes, I will use several examples from my ethnographic research with South American hunter-gatherers and Maya agriculturalists to illustrate how cooperation permits flexibility in both physiological and demographic traits that allow humans to maximize fertility and minimize juvenile mortality in ways not available to our closest nonhuman relatives. In conclusion, I bring forward what we can learn from traditional societies to inform us about population growth today.
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The Anthropology Building is located on Redondo Road, just east of University Blvd. between Martin Luther King & Las Lomas NE. Both events are free & open to the public and both venues are wheelchair-accessible. Please park at metered spaces on the north side of Las Lomas just east of Redondo or along the west edge of the Maxwell Museum parallel to Redondo, unless you have a UNM parking permit. Ticketing continues until 8 p.m.

The Journal of Anthropological Research has been published quarterly by the University of New Mexico in the interest of general anthropology since 1945. For subscription information, visit www.journals.uchicago.edu/JAR . For information on the Lecture series call: (505) 277-4544.