Holmes Lecture and Award Ceremony – Guest Speaker: John Gurche

The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the Holmes Lecture and Award Ceremony featuring guest speaker John Gurche. His talk is titled: “Life before Lucy: Delving into Humanity’s Deep Past.”

John Gurche has been reconstructing ancient hominids for nearly forty years, and has had work in 13 issues of National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institution and museums around the world. In 2019, he was plunged into a mystery, as a leading scientist approached him about creating a facial reconstruction for a newly discovered skull as yet unknown to the public. He kept the skull’s age and relationships a secret, preferring to see how much Gurche could surmise from the skull’s anatomy alone. Thus began Gurche’s involvement with an ancient mystery, and in his upcoming talk, he will take you through the twists and turns of the story.