SAS Webinar
Saturday, October 11, 2025
2:00 – 3:30 PM PT
“100,000 years of human evolution in Southern Africa”
By
Brenna M. Henn,
Associate Director for Human Genomics, Associate Professor @ UC Davis
and Gillian Meeks, PhD student @ UC Davis
via Zoom

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89404358919?pwd=f3d6GJGLszNaAGMPaC1N5axb15GMSp.1

South Africa holds a prominent place in the story of human evolution, particularly due to the significant number of hominin fossils found there. The “Cradle of Humankind,” a UNESCO World Heritage site near Johannesburg, is a key location for discoveries related to early human ancestors. Fossils like those of Australopithecus africanus and Homo naledi have provided crucial insights into our evolutionary journey. The advent of population genetic and quantitative genetic theory has added dimensions to this story of human evolution. Genomic data from Sub-Saharan African populations is being coupled with the phenotypic data to paint an evolutionary history. Join U. C. Davis, Professor Brenna Henn and her PhD student in a tour of 100,000 years of human Sub-Saharan evolution from its beginning to South African colonial period.

Brenna Henn is a population geneticist in the Department of Anthropology and in the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. She began her research by studying the deep population structure and complex migration patterns of African hunter-gatherer groups. Motivated by her PhD training in anthropology, she aims to approach questions of genomic and phenotypic diversity from an interdisciplinary standpoint. She continues to primarily focus on African populations. Her field sites include efforts to collect DNA samples, demographic data and biomedical phenotypes in the Kalahari Desert, Cederberg Mountains and the Richtersveld of South Africa, as well as collaborations in Namibia and Ethiopia.