User:Clarkjb

Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts is the director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program and curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. He received his B.A. in anthropology from Temple University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1982, after which he taught anthropology at Yale University and served as curator of physical anthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum. A renowned specialist in human origins research, Dr. Potts joined the Smithsonian in 1985. He has spent much of his career piecing together a record of Earth’s environmental change and human adaptation to those shifts. His ideas about how human evolution was a response to environmental uncertainty and disruption have stimulated wide attention and new research in several scientific fields. During Dr. Potts’s tenure at the Smithsonian, he has developed a program of international collaboration among scientists interested in the ecological aspects of human evolution. He leads excavations at early human sites in the East African Rift Valley, including the famous handaxe site of Olorgesailie, Kenya, and Kanam near Lake Victoria, Kenya. He also co-directs ongoing projects in southern and northern China that compare evidence of early human behavior and environments from eastern Africa to eastern Asia. The author of numerous research articles and books, such as Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai (Aldine de Gruyter, 1988) and Humanity’s Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability (William Morrow, 1996), Dr. Potts has also been interviewed numerous times on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Talk of the Nation, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and NBC’s Today Show. He has received a number of honors, including a Certificate of Honor from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the Emmy-winning Tales of the Human Dawn on PBS (1990), election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004), the Explorer's Club Lowell Thomas Award (2005), and The Peter Buck Chair in Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History (2008).