2026 Grace Kimball Memorial Lecture at Wilkes University

Date and Time

• Wednesday, Mar 18, 2026  7pm

Location

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Details

Paleontologist and biological anthropologist, Daniel R. Green, will present the 2026 Grace Kimball Memorial Lecture, “Chemical Paleontology: Paleoclimate and Evolution from the East African Rift System,” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 18, in Stark Learning Center 105. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Global cooling over the past 50 million years has transformed Earth’s ecology. In Africa, increasingly open landscapes saw the adaptive radiation of our hominin ancestors alongside other clades.

What do new geochemical (stable isotope) records from teeth tell us about how African fauna responded to interchange with Eurasia, aridification and increased seasonality? Why do teeth provide unique records of temporally fine-scaled climatic and behavioral processes? And how did primates and human ancestors thrive in changing African landscapes?

Lastly, can the special properties of fossilized teeth extend tropical paleoproteomics further back in time, resolving uncertainties not only in the ecological regimes that framed evolution, but in evolutionary history itself?

Daniel Green is a paleoecologist and biological anthropologist who studies the environmental context of primate and human evolution in Africa. He studies and teaches vertebrate anatomy and evolution with an emphasis on dentition, and he uses stable isotope geochemistry in his research. He directs the Kenya Field Program at Harvard University.