Maxwell Museum to Host Ancestors Lecture

The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology will present the Ancestors Lecture, "Sivapithecus: The Life and Death of a Miocene Ape," by Sherry Nelson on Thursday, Jan. 30 at 7 p.m. in the Hibben Hall, room 105.

Fifteen million years ago, a great variety of apes were living in what is tropical Africa and Southeast Asia. Seven million years later, many of those apes went extinct, and only a few great ape species still exist in those regions. Some questions that Nelson discusses in this lecture include "what kind of world supported all of these apes" and "what were these apes like?"

Nelson will focus on one kind of ape, Sivapithecus, in her lecture. Fossils for Sivapithecus were found in Pakistan amidst a remarkable sequence of vertebrate fossils spanning the past 20 million years. This fossil sequence provides a rare glimpse of an ape throughout its peak and demise. This lecture uses the fossil sequence to present a reconstruction of Sivapithecus's habits through isotopic and dental microwear analyses with a view to understanding Miocene ape ecology and extinction.

Nelson is an assistant professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of New Mexico. She has conducted field work with fossil apes and hominid localities; living lemurs, monkeys and apes, modern Hadza forages or hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world, including Costa Rica, Pakistan, Spain, Turkey, South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information please contact Mary Beth Hermans, (505) 277-1400 or mhermans@unm.edu.