Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr (born 1965) is a palaeoanthropologist and Director of the Duckworth Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
Marta Mirazón Lahr
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Born | 1965 (age 58–59) Buenos Aires, Argentina |
Occupation | Evolutionary Biologist |
Nationality | British & Argentinian |
Alma mater | University of São Paulo University of Cambridge |
Partner | Robert Foley (academic) |
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mirazon Lahr graduated in Biology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She later earned a Masters and PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge,[1] following which she was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Clare College. She was then an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology of University of São Paulo (1995–98), before returning to Cambridge in 1999 as a lecturer in Biological Anthropology and Fellow of Clare College.[2][3] Mirazon Lahr was promoted to University Reader in Human Evolutionary Biology in 2005.[4]
In 2001 Mirazon Lahr, with co-founder and husband Robert Foley,[5] established the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) at the University of Cambridge, with funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust. The Centre was designed to provide a home for the Duckworth Collection, and up-to-date laboratories and facilities to support research in human evolution which integrated genetics, anthropology, and other fields.[6]
Mirazon Lahr was awarded the Phillip Leverhulme Prize in 2004.[7]
Lahr's research is in human evolution, and ranges across human and hominin morphology, prehistory and genetics. Her early work provided a test of the Multiregional Hypothesis of modern humans origins, and underlined much of the argument against models of regional continuity in traits between archaic and modern humans.[8] This research expanded into a fuller consideration of the origins of modern human diversity, published as a book in 1996 - The Evolution of Human Diversity - by Cambridge University Press.[9] Her subsequent research continues to explore human diversity from a number of different perspectives and methodological approaches, and includes archaeology, palaeobiology, genomics and human biology.[10][11][12]
She and Robert Foley were the first to propose a ‘southern route’ for humans out of Africa, and for human diversity to be the product of multiple dispersals as well as local adaptation.[11][12][13][14] She has led field projects in the Amazon, the Solomon Islands,[15][16] India, the Central Sahara[17] and Kenya,[18] the last two focusing on issues to do with the origins and dispersals of modern humans in Africa.
Mirazon Lahr is currently the director of the IN-AFRICA Project, an Advanced Investigator Award from the European Research Council (ERC) to examine the role of east Africa in modern human origins.[19] As part of the IN-AFRICA Project, she has led the excavations at the site of Nataruk in Turkana, Kenya, establishing the existence of prehistoric warfare among nomadic hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago.[20]
She was recently interviewed alongside Richard and Meave Leakey as part of the documentary 'Bones of Turkana', a National Geographic Special about palaeoanthropology and human evolution in the Turkana Basin, Kenya.[21][22]
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