This event is a screening of the award-winning documentary Rise of the Warrior Apes, featuring a question and answer session with collaborating scientist Dr. John Mitani.

“Filmed over 23 years, Rise of the Warrior Apes tells the epic story of an extraordinary troop of chimpanzees in Ngogo, Uganda – featuring four mighty warriors who rule through moral ambiguity, questionable politics, strategic alliances, and destroyed trust. Read more…

Chimpanzees and their sister species, the bonobo, are humankind’s closest living relatives. Because of this close evolutionary relationship, chimpanzees provide a model system to evaluate claims about human uniqueness. Read more…

The Leakey Foundation, Chicago Council on Science and Technology and Chicago Public Library present

 The Origins of the Genus Homo

When did our ancestors look the way we expect the earliest members of our genus to have looked? Read more…

Every human carries a unique individual genome. The ways in which human genomes are similar or different to one another is just now being detailed at high resolution thanks to technological advances in DNA sequencing. These new observations reveal much about our origins as humans and the evolutionary processes that shape both human adaptation and disease. Read more…

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The discovery that a microorganism produced penicillin in 1928 ushered in an unprecedented global effort to mine for new antibiotics from the environment, in particular from microorganisms that live in soil. It remains one of the most impactful scientific discoveries in our species’ history, as it resulted in nearly doubling our life span. Read more…