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In this lecture, , Professor Dean Falk discusses the controversies surrounding Homo floresiensis and how new evidence has blazed the trail for reconsidering the big picture of human evolution. Professor Falk explores the debates that emerged after discovery of the ‘Hobbit’, drawing close parallels to the intellectual turf-guarding and palaeopolitics that immediately followed Raymond Dart’s unearthing of Australopithecus africanus. Professor Falk is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. Her interests include brain evolution and the emergence of language, music, warfare and analytical thinking in humans.

For the fourth annual Raymond Dart Lecture, Griffith University welcomes Dr Rick Potts to discuss the significance of climate adaptability when exploring the origins of our species. As an example, Dr Potts highlights how climate dynamics and resource uncertainty may have influenced the development of mobile technologies, social networks and symbolic behaviour around 320,000 years ago in the southern Kenya rift valley. Dr Potts is a paleoanthropologist and Director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

In the second annual Raymond Dart Lecture, Dr Henry Gee makes the claim that science is not about what we know but, instead, about what we don’t—and that the more we discover, the more we reveal how little we understand about the world we inhabit. This, he asserts, should not be the source of despair but rather an energising excitement. Dr Gee has been an editor at the international weekly science journal Nature for the last 30 years, seeing to publication a range of groundbreaking findings, from feathered dinosaurs to Homo floresiensis—the extraordinary ‘Hobbit’.

, this talk by Professor Bernard Woods explains why the search for reliable answers to the when and the why of humanity’s origins is almost certainly doomed to failure. This, Professor Wood argues, is not necessarily an impediment to progress; rather, it is an indication that we must instead learn to live with an incomplete data set and accept that there are questions in human evolution that will never be answered to our satisfaction. Professor Wood is one of the world’s leading palaeoanthropologists and heads the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Palaeobiology at George Washington University, USA in the Columbian College of Arts and Science. His research interests centre around a long-term fascination with hominin systematics.