Wednesday, April 8, 2026
5:30 pm
Kristen Hawkes is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. She studies age and sex differences in behavior, using comparisons between people and other primates, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary modeling to develop and test hypotheses about the evolution of human life histories and social behavior.
By combining empirical observations with theory and modeling aimed to explain broader mammalian variation Hawkes and her colleagues developed a Grandmother Hypothesis to account for evolution of the long postmenopausal lifespans, slower maturation, yet earlier weaning that distinguish us from our living great ape cousins.