Mark Stoneking will visit the National Humanities Center April 2-5

Research Triangle Park, N.C.  Mark Stoneking, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, will visit the National Humanities Center April 2-5 as a Meymandi Fellow. Stoneking is the latest visiting scholar participating in the Center's ongoing Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity initiative, bringing together scientists and humanists to address shared questions about being human.

As a researcher, Stoneking is perhaps most famous for his estimation that human clothing originated about 72,000 years ago, a fact determined by sequencing the genes of head and body lice. See the March 8, 2007 New York Times article "In Lice, Clues to Human Origin and Attire" or the 2003 Science News article "The Naked Truth? Lice hint at a recent origin of clothing" for more on Stoneking's research.

During his time at the Center, Stoneking will lead a lunchtime seminar and an evening faculty seminar with local scholars engaged in the ASC project. On Wednesday, April 4, at 1:30 p.m., he will speak at The Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, Duke University.