Race, Sex, and Human Evolution
A three-part lecture series that exposes biases that underlie the study of our evolutionary past. All lectures are free and open to the public.
Centuries before fossils were accepted as being extinct human relatives, the conception of human history was based on a Great Chain of Being that not only identified numerous human races, but arranged them and males and females within them hierarchically, from the “lowest” to the “highest”. The discovery in 1857 of the first Neanderthal was seen as providing evolutionary evidence of a racial and sexual hierarchy.