Gavan Lecture: Alex Bentley
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Date
October 16, 2025
Location
Middlebush Hall, University of Missouri
Area
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Please join the Department of Anthropology for a special lecture from Dr. Alex Bentley, this year's speaker for the James A. and Margaret S. Gavan Lecture.
Collaborators through Time: How Humans Partnered with Nature, Technology, and Each Other
For most of human prehistory, sociocultural complexity evolved gradually as technical knowledge was transmitted within kin-based communities across many generations. Today, by contrast, knowledge often spreads rapidly across populations and within single generations, producing evolutionary patterns that increasingly resemble random copying. Drawing on examples from prehistoric technologies, arts, disease, and kinship, I will explore how cultural evolution has shifted from the deep past to the present era of artificial intelligence. Computational approaches, together with qualitative study and models of social learning, allow us to bridge these different modes of cultural change. This perspective highlights why anthropology remains vital—not only for understanding the deep ancestry of being human, but also for adapting to a world where AI and humans comingle in a new society.Key Speaker: Alex Bentley
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University of Missouri Department of Anthropology
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Our university is the oldest public land grant institution west of the Mississippi, a member of the AAU, and the highest category of research universities, R1. We are a small department with an emphasis on data driven scientific approaches to the study of human biology, behavior, culture, and evolution. Departmental faculty conduct research all over the globe, and ongoing research crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries, and includes field, lab, and computational methods. We continue to be an active and vibrant center for scientifically oriented anthropological research, teaching, and scholarship.
