Free Hybrid Lecture
Location: Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Speaker: Jean-Jacques Hublin, Professor at the Collège de France (Paris), Emeritus Professor at the Max Planck Society
Hallam L. Movius, Jr. Lecture Series
The arrival of Homo sapiens in the mid-latitudes of Eurasia 48,000 to 45,000 years ago and the disappearance of the Neanderthals some millennia later mark one of the most pivotal episodes in human evolution. Drawing on cutting-edge work in archaeology, paleogenetics, and palaeoproteomics, Jean-Jacques Hublin’s lecture will illustrate how this process was neither sudden nor uniform. In Western Europe, early modern humans entered the Neanderthal world far earlier than once believed, at times encountering and interbreeding with local populations. Instead of a simple geographic expansion, the evidence points to a complex mosaic of migrations, contacts, and extinctions. This led to a gradual reconfiguration of human populations from a world shared by multiple human forms to one inhabited by a single surviving lineage.
Advance registration recommended for in-person and online attendance.
Free admission. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 5:00 pm. Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the Harvard Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard Department of Anthropology, and the American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University.
About the Speaker
Jean-Jacques Hublin has held the Chair of Paleoanthropology at the Collège de France since 2021, after serving as a Visiting Professor at the institution from 2014. He currently leads the Paleoanthropology team within the Interdisciplinary Center for Research in Biology (CIRB).
After beginning his career as a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) ) from 1981 to 1998, he joined higher education as Professor at the University of Bordeaux where he taught from 1999 to 2004. In 2004, Professor Hublin founded the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, which he directed until 2021. Under his leadership, the department became one of the world’s leading centers for research on human evolution.
Professor Hublin has held visiting or teaching appointments at major international institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Leiden University. He is the founder of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE) and served as its President from 2011 to 2020.
Jean-Jacques Hublin has played a pioneering role in the development of virtual paleoanthropology, particularly through the application of advanced imaging and computational methods to the study of fossil remains. His research has focused primarily on the evolution of Neanderthals and on the emergence, dispersal, and expansion of Homo sapiens across Eurasia and beyond. He has also made major contributions to the study of brain evolution, as well as growth and developmental processes in hominins. In addition to his empirical research, he has published influential work on the history and intellectual foundations of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline.
To address these questions, Professor Hublin has conducted extensive fieldwork in Europe and North Africa and has authored more than 460 peer-reviewed scientific publications. His work has significantly reshaped current understanding of the biological, cultural, and historical processes that underlie the emergence of modern humanity.
He is a Knight of the French National Order of the Legion of Honour and has been awarded the Wissam Al-Kafaa Al-Fikria, Morocco’s Order of Intellectual Merit, by His Majesty King Mohammed VI. Among other distinctions, he received the International Fyssen Prize in 2021 and the Balzan Prize in 2023, the year he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
