Chris N. Bayer

Dr. Chris Bayer spent the last decade working for Tulane University as a social scientist in Africa.

In a small room in the Nairobi National Museum, he encountered hominid skull replicas unearthed from the East African soil, lined up on a table. Seeing them for the first time, he proceeded, like a doubting Thomas, to poke his fingers through the empty eye sockets of our ancient ancestors and relatives. "Why," he asked himself, "did I have to come all the way to Kenya to see this?"

In 2013 he and Michael Luberda designed the “Be a Paleoanthropologist for a Day” lab, piloting it in 7 high schools in New Orleans.

He is co-author of the paper "Measure, Then Show: Grasping Human Evolution Through an Inquiry-Based, Data-driven Hominin Skulls Lab."

September 2016