Please click here for the full flyer containing the information related to the Annual Symposium.

Registration:    9:00 – 9:30

Venue:        Delta Environment Centre, Delta Park, Road No. 3, Victory Park, Johannesburg.

 

Parking:      Secure parking at the Centre.

 

Fees:        Please note that the student fee is only applicable to full-time students, please supply student number. 

 

Catering:  Bring your own picnic lunch to enjoy at the tables or on the lawns. The price of a glass of wine or fruit juice is included in the registration fee. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be served mid-morning and after the last lecture.

Book Table:  A wide selection of new and second-hand books will be available for purchasing before the symposium starts, at the morning tea break, the lunch period and at the end of the symposium during the afternoon tea break.

 

The Northern Branch’s Annual Symposium is designed to bring academics and society members together once a year for a day of fascinating lectures. 

These days we often hear about how the climate is changing, the seas are rising, the ice caps are melting. We seem to see far more on the news channels about severe hurricanes, flooding, forest fires, droughts, and extinctions of species, be they of land animals, marine animals, or plants. At a human and animal level we have starvations due to climate change. Yet we have politicians who deny the very existence of global warming or more correctly climate change. 

 

The 2019 annual symposium looks back over time at some of the climate-related mega-events that have helped to form the world that we now live in. We move from the extinctions of Triassic times to the earlier and middle stone ages, and how early humans coped in glacial and inter-glacial times. Then to humans and climate change in the later stone age, and, more recently, in the last 1000 years. A world that we are poisoning with our modern use of plastic and carbon emissions.

 

These talks will focus on the impact of past climate changes on life on earth. We will close with a look into our possible future.

 

 

 

Prof Jonah Choiniere is Professor of Palaeontology at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, He completed his PhD at the George Washington University in 2010, and worked for two years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City before moving to Johannesburg. His research is on the rise of South African dinosaurs after the Triassic mass extinction.

 

 

Prof Marion Bamford obtained her PhD in Palaeobotany from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990. She is the Director of the Evolutionary Studies Institute (formerly the Bernard Price Institute) where she supervises postgraduate students and lectures in Palaeobotany. Her main research interest is fossil wood but she also studies fossil leaves, seeds, pollen, phytoliths and charcoal and uses them to reconstruct the past vegetation and interpret the past climate.

 

 

Prof Lyn Wadley is based in the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits where she specializes in Middle Stone Age cognitive archaeology. She is an A1-rated National Research Foundation researcher. In 2014 and 2015 she was on the Thomson-Reuters High Citation list that records the top 1% of researchers globally. 

 

Dr Jennifer Fitchett is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her primary research focus is on climate change, and the impacts on the human and natural environment, spanning decades to tens of thousands of years. She completed her PhD in 2015 as part of a split site programme between Wits and University College London.

 

 

Prof Stephan Woodborne is the Senior Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Scientist at iThemba LABS (Laboratory for accelerator based sciences). He obtained a PhD. in archaeology from the University of Cape Town in 1996. He is Associate Professor at the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of KwaZulu Natal, and a research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand.

 

 

Dr Kelsey Glennon is an evolutionary biologist interested in processes that generate new species. Her research involves fieldwork in the Drakensberg, genetics, and greenhouse experiments. She obtained a BSc in Biology from Salisbury University in Maryland, USA in 2005, and went on to finish her PhD in 2010 at the George Washington University.