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Today, Curtis Marean gave the first lecture in the CHES Lecture Series for this semester. Dr. Marean's presentation was entitled, "A General Model for the Paleoecology of the Now Submerged Palaeo-Agulhas Plain, An Extinct Ecosystem Crucial to Modern Human Origins," based upon this many years of research in Africa. Dr. Marean's research addresses not only ecological questions about human evolution, such as the shift toward exploitation of reliable resources in a marine coastal context about 110,000 years ago, but also the origins of the "hyperprosocial" tendencies that define humans and distinguishes them from other creatures.