February 12, 2026: Dr. Christopher Kiahtipes
Early Homo sapiens in Africa’s Rain Forests: An Unnatural History?
Dr. Christopher Kiahtipes
Ph.D., Associate Curator of the USF Herbarium; Manager of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment’s Archaeobotany and Paleoecology Laboratory
IN PERSON: Roberts Recreation Center, 1246 50th Ave N, St Petersburg, FL 33703-3542
Africa’s rain forests are globally significant environments because of their role in shaping terrestrial biodiversity and regulating major Earth processes. However, this environment is also symbolically important within our narratives about nature, wilderness, and conservation and is often prone to mischaracterizations. In this talk, I describe how these mischaracterizations shape research activities and management policies in Africa’s rain forests before exploring how novel collaborative research in archaeology and paleoecology challenges our models of how people, rain forests, and climates interact. This talk primarily focuses on evaluating the range of Africa’s habitats occupied by Homo sapiens populations during the last 300,000 years and comparing this with our understanding of rain forest responses to major shifts in climate at this time. I close by considering the ecological opportunities and environmental factors influencing the settlement patterns of Pleistocene foragers and how this line of questioning can have a positive impact on conservation policy.
Christopher A. Kiahtipes is Associate Curator of the USF Herbarium and manager of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment’s Archaeobotany and Paleoecology Laboratory. Specializing in the analysis of plant micro-fossils, his projects combine field, laboratory, and collections-based research to address questions about human-environment interactions at evolutionary and historical time scales. With dozens of publications spanning global environments including Africa’s rain forests, Caribbean coastlines, and arid regions of North and South America, Kiahtipes seeks to deepen the integration USF’s world-class collections into novel research applications, education, and public outreach.
