CCR organized an interdisciplinary lecture, featuring a mathametician using DNA method to study human family history, on Dec 4, 2017.  The talk was given by Prof. Dinghua Shi of Shanghai University, with a title of “Historical Anthropology: Four Bloodline Case Studies”.

Family history has been the traditional territory of history and anthropology. Recent advancements in human genome have led to the emergence of a new interdisciplinary approach, called Historical Anthropology, that provides new methods, findings, and challenges to the research on the origin and evolution of human being.  In the lecture, Prof. Shi introduced Historical Anthropology by showing how bloodline trees help solve the mysterious history of four VIP families, including U.S. President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), English King Richard III (1452-1465), Chinese Emperor Cao Cao (155-220), and Chinese Zhongding King Shi Hao (1106-1194).

The lecture was in collaboration with Global China Studies of College of Liberal Arts and Social Science.