Did early humans evolve in Africa alone, or in regions throughout the world? Do Neanderthals play an important role in our genetic heritage? Why did prehistoric humans create art? Complete your understanding of the most up-to-date science behind our origins with these 24 lectures that bring you to the forefront of scientific arguments and questions that will become more important in the coming years. Surveying both the questions that continue to rile the world's greatest minds in anthropology and the cutting-edge science responsible for them, these lectures are a guide to the wide-ranging debates over the greatest family tree there is.
With these lectures, you'll travel to Ethiopia, Tanzania, Pakistan, Java, and North America. You'll peer over the shoulders of archaeologists as they unearth fossils and reconstruct the bodies and lives of our earliest ancestors. You'll follow geneticists as they use mitochondrial DNA to draw startling connections between prehistoric human populations from around the world. And you'll encounter some of our most intriguing distant relatives, including Australopithecus afarensis and Homo floresiensis.
Join Professor Hawks for this eye-opening learning experience that will bring you to the cusp of our 21st-century knowledge about the origin of humans, that will fill in critical gaps in your understanding of where we come from, and that will better prepare you for the great discoveries and fresh debates of tomorrow.