Chinese Studies Public Lecture

February 13, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Tokioka Room (Moore Hall 319) Add to Calendar

Friday, February 13, 12:00 noon

Tokioka Room (Moore Hall 319)

“The Origin of Modern Humans in China: Current Multidisciplinary Perspectives from Guangxi”

Christopher J. Bae, Department of Anthroplogy, UHM

The origin of modern Chinese has long been a debated topic. Traditional arguments revolved around the idea that modern Chinese people can trace their roots back to Homo erectus, who were the initial colonizers of the continent between 1 and 2 million years ago (usually referred to as multiregionalism). Others have argued that the history of modern Chinese people is much more recent in time, particularly because all pre-modern Homo sapiens (e.g., H. erectus, mid-Pleistocene Homo) went extinct before or upon the arrival of modern humans in the region some time after 50,000 years ago (usually referred to as the replacement hypothesis). Here, I discuss these various hypotheses in light of recent findings that have been accumulating in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, particularly as a result of our multidisciplinary field and laboratory initiatives, but through other research projects as well. A simple model of multiregionalism or replacement is probably unlikely and as data become increasingly available from the region, the sequence of evolutionary events becomes cloudier, but all the more interesting.

Christopher J. Bae is a paleoanthropologist who has been conducting collaborative field and laboratory research in eastern Asia over the past two decades on a variety of projects, including the origin of modern humans, the Movius Line, and early human subsistence strategies. Bae has published more than 75 pieces, the majority of them in SCI peer-reviewed journals and received more than $1.3M in extramural research funding. He is a recipient of the 2012 UHM Board of Regents’ Excellence in Research award. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Human Evolution, which is one of the top peer-reviewed journals in anthropology, and PLoS ONE. Feel free to visit asianprehistory.org to learn more about Dr. Bae’s various multidisciplinary research projects he and his colleagues are involved with in eastern Asia.


Event Sponsor
Center for Chinese Studies and Confucius Institute at UHM, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-8891, china@hawaii.edu

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