RICHARD POTTS is Director of The Human Origins Program, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. The program focuses on the long history of ecosystem responses to human pressures and vice versa. Museum researchers are piecing together the climatic and ecological conditions that allowed humans to evolve.

He is the author of Humanity's Descent : The Consequences of Ecological Instability and a presenter, with Stephen Jay Gould, of a videotape, Tales of the Human Dawn.

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