Catherine Smith, Paleoanthropologist, Past President of CFUW-Ottawa
Topic: Much Depends Upon Dinner: How Diet Shaped Our Evolutionary History
Our October 6th speaker is Catherine Smith, a paleoanthropologist whose research specializes on the evolution of human diet. Catherine holds degrees in Biological Anthropology and Archaeology from Trent, George Washington, and Harvard Universities. Her research has taken her from the lab to the museum and field, and from the Canadian arctic to the African equator and the Cape of Good Hope. She has studied several key dietary transitions in our evolutionary past including the origins of agriculture, the advent of cooking, the role of meat eating in shaping our bodies and brains, and how our earliest ancestors coped with climate change as Africa became drier millions of years ago. Her talk will focus on several of these key dietary adaptations and will also address present-day misconceptions, myths, and fads about how we “should” eat.
Many of you may know Catherine as the immediate Past Present of CFUW-Ottawa.
