The Ice Age Dispersal of Humans to the Americas: Do Stones, Bones and Genes Tell the Same Story

Speaker: 
Ted Goebel
 
25 Oct 2012
 
8:00 PM
 
Sun Room, Memorial Union

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Ted Goebel is an archaeologist who studies the Ice Age dispersal of modern humans to the Americas. He conducts fieldwork primarily in Siberia, Alaska, and the intermountain west of the United States and has investigated archaeological sites dating back 50,000 years. He has excavated sites that contain some of the earliest evidence of humans in Beringia. Most recently he directed field research at Serpentine Hot Springs, the Ice Age archaeological site on the Bering Land Bridge itself that contains the first dated fluted spear points in Alaska. Ted Goebel is the associate director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, where he is an associate professor of anthropology and holds the endowed professorship in First Americans Studies. Sigma Xi Lecture Series.

Scientists from four disciplines - molecular genetics, archaeology, human paleontology, and geochronology/geomorphology - are searching for the origins of the first Americans in northeast Asia and Beringia, investigating the process of human dispersal from the Old World to the New. In this lecture, Ted Goebel draws on data from each of these disciplines to address four related questions: When did modern humans appear in greater northeast Asia? What was the northeast Asian “source” of the first Americans? When did ancestors of the first Americans disperse from northeast Asia to Beringia? How did the dispersal process unfold? Ted Goebel earned his B.A. degree from Washington and Lee University in 1986, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 1993. Goebel's dissertation focused on the emergence of modern humans and the Middle-to-Upper-Paleolithic transition in Siberia. Since then, his research has investigated the peopling of Beringia. In the Great Basin of the western U.S., Goebel's research has focused on the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, a period of significant climate change and human adaptation. Since 2000, he has directed excavations at the multi-layered Bonneville Estates Rockshelter (a dry cave in eastern Nevada), which contains a series of well-preserved cultural layers spanning from about 13,000 years ago to historic times. Goebel's research has been reported in a series of journal articles in Science, Current Anthropology, and Journal of Archaeological Science.