Hominin Dispersal Pathways: A view from the Red Sea basin

Description:  Recent decades have seen increased interest in the timing and ecological conditions that facilitated hominin (early human) dispersal events out of Africa, in part because "dispersal" is becoming a useful concept for explaining the roots of modern human biocultural diversity. One of the unresolved questions concerns the geographic route/routes that hominins used during their expansion from Africa into Eurasia. The Red Sea basin stands out as a plausible setting for testing various scenarios about hominin dispersal history out of Africa. Drawing on results of recent fieldworks in the Red Sea coastal regions of the Sudan and Eritrea, this talk will highlight the emerging picture about the Stone Age record of the western periphery of the Red Sea, and the implications of the recovered data for assessing the region's role as a hominin habitat and dispersal conduit.

Bio:  Dr. Amanuel Beyin is a broadly trained prehistoric archaeologist. His research interests encompass Out-of-Africa hominin dispersal history, stone tool technology, the development of modern human behavior, and early Holocene hunter-gatherer adaptations in northeast Africa. He has developed successful projects in the Red Sea coastal regions of Eritrea and Sudan, the Turkana Basin of northern Kenya, and along the Kilwa coast of Tanzania. In 2017, Beyin launched a collaborative project on the Red Sea coast of the Sudan for which he was awarded grants from the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation. The project aims to find Paleolithic sites that provide insight into early human adaptations in the western periphery of the Red Sea. The project to date has documented five sites and numerous low-density lithic scatters on diverse landscape settings. Beyin’s work has been published in various journals, including Quaternary Science Reviews, Evolutionary Anthropology, Journal of Field Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science, African Archaeological Review, and Quaternary International. He earned a B.A. in Archaeology from the University of Asmara, Eritrea, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, New York, where he also pursued two years of postdoctoral study at the Turkana Basin Institute.

Sponsors:

College of Arts & Sciences

Department of Anthropology

University of Kentucky

HEVA Human Evolution & Virtual Anthropology Lab

 

Title: "Halal Tourism and the Recharting of the West"

Description:  Muslims are the fastest growing population of international tourists today, and their travel constitutes the largest cross-border movement of Muslims both historically and in our contemporary world.  Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted on the global emergence of halal tourism networks in Turkey, Spain, GCC, UK, Singapore and Malaysia, Prof. Ahmad examines how Muslim tourist itineraries are recharting our understanding of ‘the West’.

The Sheikh Lecture is open to the campus community and general public.

Reception: Refreshments will be served in the Alumni Gallery immediately following the lecture.

In recent years, a new holographic paradigm has emerged in which simple theories of gravity in low dimensions are dual to statistical ensembles of quantum mechanical systems rather than particular quantum systems. This is a conceptual departure from the conventional holographic paradigm, particularly as realized in string theory. A hallmark of such averaged holographic dualities is the non-factorization of multi-boundary observables due to the presence of Euclidean wormholes in the bulk gravitational theory. However, more realistic holographic dualities in higher dimensions are not expected to fundamentally involve microscopic averaging. Nevertheless, there are apparently contributions to the semiclassical gravitational path integral that are associated with averaging in the boundary theory. In this talk I will attempt to reconcile these perspectives by elucidating the emergence of averaging in two different models based on recent works of mine: one top-down, the other bottom-up. In both cases, averaging of boundary degrees of freedom is an emergent phenomenon associated with the expansion around the semiclassical limit.

In this talk, we present progress towards generalizing on-shell kinematics and color-kinematics duality to curved spacetimes. First, we define a perturbatively calculable quantity—the on-shell correlator—which furnishes a unified description of particle dynamics in curved spacetime. Specializing to the cases of flat and anti-de Sitter space, on-shell correlators coincide precisely with on-shell scattering amplitudes and boundary correlators respectively. We then introduce a notion of on-shell kinematics for symmetric spaces in which the corresponding on-shell momenta are built from isometry generators. Using this isometric language in AdS, we compute scalar correlators and give a field-theoretic derivation of color-kinematics duality for the nonlinear sigma model. Finally, we comment on possible extensions to spacetimes without symmetry.