ANNOUNCEMENT: Inaugural Conference of the Harvard Initiative for the Science of the Human Past

REGISTER NOW
Friday November 1, 2013

The Encounter of Science and History
Inaugural Conference

Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard
Friday November 1, 2013: 8:45-6:30 PM
Knafel Center, Gymnasium, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Leading scientists and scholars will convene at Harvard University to discuss ancient DNA and ancient pathogens; human hunting and evolution; ancient and medieval climate change; evolutionary forces in humans and pathogens; human movements and isotopes; population history from Neandertal and Denisovan genomes; the biohistory of the fall of Rome.

A poster session will spotlight research by rising scientists and scholars on  medical and historical implications of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans; the first ice core for Roman and medieval environmental history; digitizing the Roman Empire and medieval Europe; an early modern diary and the climate history of France; the genetics and history of human salt retention; the social impact of climate change in medieval Ireland; the environmental history of rice cultivation in antebellum South Carolina; genetic evidence for endogamy in India 4000 B.P.; the correspondence of Darwin and Agassiz;  visualization technology and archaeology; deducing weaning times from archaeological bones; a draft genome of the cochineal, the source of ancient carmine dye; modeling the outbreak of smallpox in Colonial Boston.

Speakers: Kyle Harper (Classics, University of Oklahoma); Johannes Krause (Institute of Scientific Archaeology, University Tübingen); Daniel E. Lieberman (Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University; Michael McCormick (History, Harvard);  Ian Morris (Classics and History, Stanford University); David Reich (Genetics, Harvard Medical School); Pardis Sabeti (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard, and Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard); Noreen Tuross (Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard).

The conference is free, but seating is limited so register now at: http://shpnovemberconference.brownpapertickets.com/

Cosponsored by the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, the Departments of Classics and History, the Medieval Studies Committee, and the Standing Committee on Archaeology, with the support of the Goelet-Berkowitz Fund.