As a kid, Dr. April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology in our department, always loved history and wanted to be directly involved in discovering it. When her mom came across an ad in the local newspaper asking for volunteers to work on a site in Old Montreal, she jumped at the chance! One week of excavating and this 18-year-old was hooked. Quoted in the local newspaper, who knew that this moment in 1987 would kick off a career leading to interviews with the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, CNN, and more! 💡 April is still out there digging, but today her research focuses on reconstructing the lives and contributions of Ice Age kids and teenagers to human cultural evolution with recent publications on children making ceramics and on how teens experienced puberty in the Upper Paleolithic. 🌍 She also collaborates with colleagues on the study of cave art in southern Australia and on the lifeways of early humans in Jordan where her team uncovered tools with the world’s oldest identifiable blood on them. We now know that 350,000 years ago, these hunter-gatherers ate everything in their environment from ducks to rhinos! 📕Dr. Nowell’s groundbreaking work is captivating audiences worldwide, especially with her book, Growing Up in the Ice Age and the Nature of Things documentary Little Sapiens featuring work with Drs. Mary Lewis and Jennifer French on CBC-Gem and will soon be broadcast in France and Japan. She's even got a Wikipedia page! Talk about making history

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