Science on Tap goes "Back to the Stone Age with John Shea"

John Shea, professor of anthropology at Stony Brook
University, a world expert in Stone Age hi tech weaponry, and featured with
Alan Alda in the recent PBS mini-series The
Human Spark, will be the guest on the next episode of Science on Tap.

Recorded before a live audience in our new location, the
Stony Brook Yacht Club, on the evening of November 12th, 2013, the show
will be posted on the website of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating
Science. Hosting the event will be Journalism School professor and 60 Minutes alumnus Steven Reiner.

John Shea is a skilled flintknapper, able to turn a lump of
stone into a lethal weapon in minutes. He is especially fascinated by spears
and arrows, whose creation requires the combining of different materials – wood,
twine, glue as well as finely fabricated stone points – and reveals a
sophistication of thinking that is the hallmark of modern humans. Yet he and
other archeologists have found evidence of these Stone Age guided missiles
going back over 100,000 years in Africa, millennia before the arrival of Homo
sapiens, our direct ancestors, in Europe. Indeed, Shea argues that the
invention of projectile weapons was such a great evolutionary leap forward in
hunting technology that it permitted modern humans’ expansion out of our
ancestral African home – and gave them a critical edge over the humans then
living in Europe, the Neanderthals.

Shea will bring along some of his hand-made weaponry to the
Yacht Club bar, where he will discuss with Reiner not only their value in
hunting – and war – but also their role in the evolution of such key
social attributes as cooperation and even language.

The evening will also include video of Alan Alda hurling one
of John’s spears to lethally wound a plastic Bambi.

In the spirit of Science
on Tap the Stony Brook Yacht Club bar will be open for business, and pub
food will be available for purchase. For reservations, email us at aldacenter@stonybrook.edu.