To kick off this exciting new chapter, we will welcome Dr. Jonathan Friedlaender back to Temple. Dr. Friedlaender retired from Temple in 2006 after 40 years of biomedical research focused on the peoples of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea in the Southwest Pacific.
 
Dr. Friedlaender's genetic research was key to understanding the population and migration histories of peoples in that region, which was poorly understood in the 1960s. We now know that small groups of modern humans first arrived in what is now New Guinea and Australia about 50,000 years ago, having moved from Africa along the southern coast of Asia in approximately the preceding 20,000 years. Once they accomplished the sea crossing to New Guinea/Australia, they quickly expanded to nearby islands, but were largely isolated from other populations in Southeast Asia until fairly recently (around 3,000 years ago). During this long period of isolation, they became very distinctive in their various cultures and biological constitutions. For example, more than 600 languages are spoken only by peoples in this region. We now also know that the ancestors of these peoples have the highest rates of Neanderthal and Denisovan intermixture of any contemporary human groups - the intermixture presumably having occurred in Asia before the colonization of Australia/New Guinea.

​Dr. Friedlaender's personal collection of objects, which he donated to Temple in 2007, form the backbone of our new exhibit, Snapshots of Melanesia. Dr. Friedlaender will reflect on his experiences doing anthropological fieldwork in this part of the world.