Upper Paleolithic paintings depict Ice Age horses
and a rhinoceros in Chauvet Cave, France.

Leakey Lectures return to Caltech

After an 18-year hiatus from Caltech, the Leakey Speaker Series on Human Origins returns to the campus that served as its first home. Beginning this month, the series will bring researchers of the highest rank whose work delves into the oldest prehistoric rock art yet discovered, the evolutionary importance of a long human childhood, and the presence (or curious absence) of violence among our fellow primates.

In “The Chauvet Cave Now: The Oldest Rock Art Site in the World,” prehis-torian Jean Clottes will share Ice Age images of mammoths, deer, bears—in all, 425 animal images drawn on the walls of a cave in southern France. Discovered by spelunkers in 1994, the extensive Chauvet Cave’s galleries house images that have been radiocarbon dated to 30,400 B.C. This makes them more than 2,000 years older than the bulls found at the famed Lascaux cave.

Clottes, who is a rock-art specialist, says the level of sophistication required to produce the Chauvet drawings brings into doubt the current thinking that art evolution develops in a linear fashion, from crude to complex. This lecture will be presented on Wednesday, February 12.

Compared to the chimpanzees, our closest relatives, we humans take an unusually long time to reach maturity. Our life spans are also quite long, longer than that of any other primate. One theory posits that hunting promoted nuclear families, which in turn promoted a longer period of dependency in children. However, recent research suggests that our long lifespans permit a prolonged childhood. In the lecture “Grandmothers and Human Evolution,” Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist and evolutionary ecologist, will discuss this hypothesis in addition to the intriguing possibility that our lifespans are a legacy inherited from ancestral grandmothers. This lecture will take place on Wednesday, March 19.

While studying chimpanzees and bonobos, Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and biological anthropologist, noticed that the bonobos are tranquil while the chimpanzees are capable of humanlike aggression. The fact that these two apes are our closest relatives makes the comparison that much more intriguing. Wrangham will explore the mystery of why we are temperamentally like chimpanzees in some ways, and like bonobos in others. This lecture will be presented on Wednesday, May 28.

Begun in the early 1970s, the Leakey Lectures attracted many of the rising stars of archaeology and anthropology such as Louis Leakey, Mary Leakey, Donald C. Johanson, Jane Goodall, and Dian Fossey. All three lectures in the Leakey Speaker Series on Human Origins are open to the public.

Tickets are $10 per lecture, $24 for the series. For tickets and information, contact Public Events
at (626) 395-4652, 1 (888) 2CALTECH, or events@caltech.edu. Individuals with a disability, call (626) 395-4688 (voice) or 395-3700 (TDD). Visit Public Events at www.events.caltech.edu.

Each lecture will be presented at 8 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium.
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