Provost Lectures Feature SBU Distinguished Anthropologists

Stony Brook University’s popular Provost’s Lecture Series featured two SUNY Distinguished Service Professors when anthropologists Lawrence Martin and Patricia Wright treated an audience to back-to-back lectures covering their remarkable careers. 

“Pat Wright and Lawrence Martin are people who are good at connections,” said Katheryn Twiss, chair of the Department of Anthropology, in her welcoming remarks February 11 in the Charles B. Wang Center Theater. “They don’t just build institutions, they hold our hands and help us all join them. They connect us to people throughout the university, across the nation and around the globe. Anthropology is, broadly speaking, the study of humans. Pat and Lawrence connect our departments to humans on huge and impactful scales.”

In “Human Evolution in the Turkana Basin, Kenya,” Martin discussed his journey from studying ape evolution to directing the Turkana Basin Institute, telling attendees how he came to Stony Brook from the UK in 1985. 

“I came here because Stony Brook had one of the best programs in the world in primate and human evolution,” said Martin, Director Emeritus of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI). “In my second year, I became undergraduate program director, and then moved into administrative roles. After getting tenure, I became director of the inter-departmental doctoral program in anthropological sciences.” 

That administrative experience led to a position as dean of the Graduate School. In the course of that work, he met the man who would change the future of his career when renowned paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician Richard Leakey came to Stony Brook to receive an honorary degree. 

“He and I had met a little bit over a period of several years,” said Martin. “He visited Stony Brook a number of times and we eventually recruited him to the faculty in 2002. Over the next three or four years, he and I spent a lot of time together and got to know each other pretty well. And when he had the idea of building the Turkana Basin Institute, I was able to facilitate some things because I knew how the administration worked.” 

Leakey co-founded TBI in Nairobi, Kenya, in an academic partnership with Stony Brook in 2005. Today, the Institute provides permanent infrastructure at two field campuses on the East and West shores of Lake Turkana to enable year-round research in the remote area of sub-Saharan Africa. After founding director John Fleagle left in 2012 to return to research, Leakey asked Martin to become director. 

“I’d never been to the Turkana Basin Institute, and I’d never been to that part of Kenya,” said Martin, who took the position sight unseen. “If you’re interested in human evolution, there have been finds that have made the cover of Nature, arguably the most important science magazine in the world, on 12 occasions. That is unprecedented. Simply put, if you’re going to do this type of research, the Turkana Basin is the most important place in the world.” 

Martin said that in the past 20 years, one of the revolutions in human evolution has been the understanding that the DNA of virtually every person came out of northeastern Africa in the last 80,000 years. 

Martin mentioned meeting Pat Wright in Madagascar, where they studied lemurs, and Wright seamlessly picked up the story Martin began, discussing Madagascar’s unique biodiversity in a lecture titled “Clues to Madagascar’s Mysterious Past: Big Birds of Christmas River, Lost Rainforest of Crystal Mountain and Rainforest Fossils.”

Wright traveled to Madagascar in 1986 in search of the greater bamboo lemur, a species abundant at the sub-fossil lemur sites of the north but believed to have gone extinct in the recent past. She found that the greater bamboo lemur still exists and discovered a new species that was named Hapalemur aureus, the golden bamboo lemur. 

“Madagascar looks small, but it’s a very big place,” she said. “The biodiversity is extraordinary and the lemurs are incredible. The sad part is that 91 percent of all lemurs are in one of the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List of Threatened Species categories, and 18 lemur species have gone extinct in the past 500 years. So lemurs are on the brink of extinction. The reason is deforestation, fires and erosion due to subsistence hunters.” 

In addition to discovering a new species of lemur, Wright established Ranomafana National Park in southeastern Madagascar.

“There are fossil sites 2000 years old in Madagascar, there are dinosaurs there,” she said, noting that the dinosaur skeleton displayed in Stony Brook’s Humanities building came from northwest Madagascar.

Wright said that after an asteroid hit the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico 66 million years ago — an event widely believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and 75 percent of all life on Earth — the world “went dark.”

“We don’t have fossils from the Oligocene, the Eocene, or the Miocene periods filling in those blanks. The lemurs, or some ancestor, came over from Africa maybe 50 million years ago. They were the first animals to arrive after the previous ones were wiped out. That’s why I study them.” 

Wright told of notable fossil finds including hippos, elephants, turtles, tortoises and crocodiles. “There weren’t any people on Madagascar then, so I thought I had a whole ecosystem that hadn’t had human intervention.”

However, later research would indicate that there was indeed human presence in Madagascar, evidenced by the discovery of tool marks on fossils discovered by James Hansford, a graduate student from the UK. The tool marks were made 10,000 years ago, which pushed the presence of humans back 8,000 years, much earlier than previously thought.

Another groundbreaking discovery happened in November 2024, when a research team discovered Ivohiboro, a cave in southeast Madagascar containing bones identified as a hippopotamus. This was the first discovery of an extinct animal’s bones in its original habitat. 

“I would never have predicted finding this,” she said. “A hippopotamus in a pristine rainforest? Just amazing.” 

Wright’s team collaborated with the Leakey Foundation and local universities to excavate the site. They found 13 more caves and additional bones, suggesting a previously unknown forest hippo. The discovery also revealed a peat forest that could have spread fires, impacting Madagascar’s biodiversity. The team plans to return later this year for further exploration.

Every semester, the Provost’s Lecture Series highlights the work of two of Stony Brook’s SUNY Distinguished Faculty members.

“Today was one of those academic days that I’ll remember my entire career,” said Carl Lejuez, executive vice president and provost at Stony Brook. “The last 90 minutes have been so inspiring, and it’s exactly why we got into this. Lots of people are intellectually gifted, but we heard from two folks today who are intellectually gifted and intellectually generous.”

— Robert Emproto