George Washington University Professor Bernard Wood, who has been working with Richard Leakey in Africa on early hominid research for nearly 40 years, will give a free public lecture at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Saturday, Oct. 27.
The presentation by Wood, who directs the GWU Center for Advanced Study of Human Evolutionary History, is titled "Recent Advances in Our Understanding of Human Evolution." The event is the CU-Boulder anthropology department's annual Distinguished Biological Archaeology Lecture.
The talk will be held at 5 p.m. in room 270 of the Hale Science Building and will include a question-and-answer session with the audience. Hale Science is located just east of Broadway and Pleasant Street and parking is available along University Avenue.
Wood also will give a second, more specialized talk on problems and opportunities in investigating human evolution on Friday, Oct. 26, at 4 p.m. in Hale 270. That talk also is free and open to the public.
Wood also is an adjunct professor at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and a physician who practiced as a surgeon before moving into academic life in 1972. He joined the Leakey team in 1968 on Richard Leakey's first expedition to Lake Turkana, then known as Lake Rudolf, while he was a medical student, and has remained with the group and has described many of the primary fossil discoveries.
The Leakey expeditions included trips to the eastern and western shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya's Great Rift Valley resulting in many important finds. They included early stone age tools dating to about 1.9 million years old and evidence of early members of the genus Homo, including skulls of Homo habilis and Homo erectus and remains of australopithecines. The extraordinary discovery of the nearly complete 1.6 million-year-old Homo erectus skeleton known as "Nariokotome Boy" is thought to be among the most important discoveries by Leakey's group.
As the most highly cited hominid paleobiologist in the world, Wood has authored or co-authored eight books and nearly 300 papers, articles and book chapters.
Wood's research centers on increasing the understanding of early human evolutionary history by developing and improving ways to analyze the human fossil record. Such techniques, including the use of bioinformatics have improved the way early human evolution information is stored and organized.
Wood currently holds the title of the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Origins at GWU. He previously was the chair of anatomy at both the University of London and the University of Liverpool and was dean of the University of Liverpool Medical School from 1995 to 1997, when he moved to GWU.