Human Skin: The Ever-evolving Interface

Plenary lecture by Nina Jablonski, Atherton Professor and Evan Pugh University Professor Emerita of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University.

Abstract

People mostly take their skin for granted and never think about the many indispensable biological and social functions that skin serves in their lives. This lecture will invite people to understand the many and diverse ways in which their skin contributes to their essential humanity. We will first explore how skin has evolved biologically to meet the requirements of basic survival in the last seven million years since the emergence of the human lineage. We will then turn our attention to how skin has evolved culturally to be a remarkably versatile interface for receiving and sending “messages,” through touch and decoration and, thus, being a powerful focus of attention and social interaction.

Contact and moderator: Irina Hron

Bio

Nina Jablonski is a biological anthropologist recognised for her contributions to understanding primate and human evolution, especially to questions not answered directly from the fossil record. Fascinated increasingly over the years by the important but unheralded roles of skin and skin pigmentation in evolution, she focused on the origins of mostly naked human skin and diverse human skin colours. In 2000, Jablonski and her collaborator husband, George Chaplin, put forward the dual cline theory (or vitamin D-folate theory) for the evolution of human skin pigmentation that accounts for why dark skin evolved under conditions of high ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in the tropics while lighter skin was favored under conditions of lower UVR nearer the poles. Jablonski has held academic positions at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Western Australia, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Pennsylvania State University. Jablonski is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has received numerous fellowships and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to a body of more than 200 peer-reviewed scholarly papers and book chapters, Jablonski has written two popular books for adults: Skin: A Natural History (2006) and Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (2012), and has co-authored two books for children, Skin We Are In (2018) It’s Just Skin, Silly!, which will be published at the end of 2023.