Thursday, April 29, 2010, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
C. Zollikofer, University of Zurich
Abstract:
The fossil record documenting the past seven million years of human evolution is relatively scarce, such that extracting a maximum of information
with a minimum of invasiveness from each single fossil hominin specimen is a constant challenge in palaeoanthropology. In my talk, I will
illustrate how modern palaeoanthropology combines various X-ray-based imaging techniques with methods of computer graphics and 4-dimensional
morphometrics to reconstruct how a group of Miocene African great apes became bipedal, then evolved exceptionally large brains, and then got
extinct except one single species.