December 18, 1996 Contact: Jennifer McNulty (408) 459-2495; mcnulty@ua.ucsc.edu

LECTURE SERIES CONTINUES WITH JANUARY 9 TALK ON HUMAN EVOLUTION

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Adrienne Zihlman, professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, is the featured speaker in this month's Humanities Lecture Series, presented jointly by UCSC's Humanities Division and the Museum of Art and History. Zihlman's talk, ""Africa, Apes, and Ancestors: An Abridged Account of Human Evolution," takes place from 7 to 8 P.M. on Thursday, January 9, at the Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz. The talk is free and open to the public. A reception follows.

Zihlman has spent 30 years studying primate anatomy, locomotion, and human evolution. Unlike some physical anthropologists, she is not content to study only the fossil record for clues to human evolution. She believes the key to understanding how our ape ancestors functioned lies in the muscles, flesh, and movement of modern animals, and she is using groundbreaking data gathered in the dissection laboratory to reevaluate the fossil record.

On the subject of human evolution, Zihlman parts company with her colleagues who theorize that humans walk upright because our male predecessors 3 million years ago had to free their hands to hunt animals for food. Instead, in a hypothesis that integrates fossil evidence, molecular discoveries, and chimpanzee behavior, Zihlman believes that female activities, such as food-gathering and caring for infants, are just as likely to have triggered the transition to two-legged locomotion.

It was her work on chimpanzees that prompted Zihlman and three colleagues to propose in 1978 that pygmy chimpanzees--not common chimps or gorillas--are the best living model of a common ancestor of African apes and humans. Zihlman's recent pioneering work on gorilla anatomy includes male-female comparisons that have never been done before.

Zihlman joined the UCSC faculty in 1967 and is the author of The Human Evolution Coloring Book (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982).

For more information, call the Humanities Division at (408) 459-2696 or the Museum of Art and History at (408) 429-1964.

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