FORA.tv Speaker - Ian Tattersall

Biography

Ian Tattersall is currently Curator in the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Born in England and raised in East Africa, he has carried out fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen, and Mauritius.

Trained in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, and in geology and vertebrate paleontology at Yale, Tattersall has concentrated his research over the past quarter-century in two main areas, in both of which he is an acknowledged leader: the analysis of the human fossil record, and the study of the ecology and systematics of the lemurs of Madagascar.

Tattersall is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public, with several recent trade books to his credit, among them Extinct Humans (with Jeffrey Schwartz; Westview Press, 2000), Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (Harcourt Brace, 1998), and The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives (Westview Press, Revised Edition, 1999), as well as several articles in Scientific American and the co-editorship of the definitive Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory.

He lectures widely, and, as curator, has also been responsible for several major exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, including Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity (1984); Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life in Ice Age Europe (1986); Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors (1989); and the highly acclaimed Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (1993).

1 Program

A Debate: Who Was the Hobbit?

12.06.11 | 01:34:58 min | 6,093 views | 7 comments