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♪ [music] ♪
We are the paradoxical ape; bipedal,
naked, large brain. Long the master of
fire, tools and language, but still trying
to understand ourselves. Aware that death
is inevitable, yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly. We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive. We shape the
future from our shared understanding of
the past. CARTA brings together experts
from diverse disciplines to exchange
insights on who we are, and how we got
here. An exploration made possible by the
generosity of humans like you.
♪ [music] ♪
- [Ajit] And so we humans ask ourselves,
who are we? What are we doing here? Where
did we come from? How did we get here? And
where are we going? Two of these questions
fall within the realm of anthropogeny;
explaining the origin of humans. And this
is a remit of CARTA, which is run by
myself, Rusty Gage, Margaret Schoeninger,
Pascal Gagneux with help from Linda,
Ingrid, Kate, Jessie and John. Pursuing
anthroprogeny involves many academic
disciplines crossing every part of this
mesa and every part of the world. And so
our mission statement is to use all
rational and ethical approaches to seek
all verifiable facts from all relevant
disciplines to explain the origins of the
human phenomenon. And while we do that, we
try to minimize complex organizational
structures and hierarchies and unnecessary
paperwork and bureaucracy.
But in the process we also now are
beginning to try to raise awareness in
understanding the study of human origins
within the academic community, and the
public at large. So special thanks to our
major sponsors; The Mathers Foundation New
York, Jim Handelman, the director, could
not be here but in his stead, the
associate director Beverly Cheikin is
here. And of course Rita Atkinson who I
see has not arrived yet, but they are two
major sponsors. And special thanks to all
our individual supporters, who are listed
here. Many of you are in the audience and
we really appreciate your support.
The closed captioning for the video
recordings of the symposium are supported
by Elizabeth Lancaster and Eli Shefter.
Special thanks to UCSD-TV; Rich, Matt,
Marci, John, Jacob; and of course the Salk
Media services, Kent and Jon. Now before I
close, I want to make one comment. Most of
the time CARTA focuses on where we came
from and how we got here. So in the
timeline of interest, we tend to go back
millions of years and end our interest a
few tens of thousands of years ago when
humans just began to do their thing.
But in this particular symposium, although
we were focused on understanding the
origin of humans in the context of
climate. We felt it would be immoral and
foolhardy, really, to ignore what's
happening right now. And so, if you zoom
in on this little corner of our poster,
you can see the last couple of ten
thousand years and what's been happening
to the climate in terms of temperature,
average temperature. And we're here. And
today we're not only going to talk about
where we came from and how we got here,
but also look at where we are and where we
are going. And with that I'll hand over to
Charlie Kennel the chair of our session.
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