K. Lindsay Hunter

Lindsay is a trained paleoanthropologist who uses her more than 15 years of experience to make sense of the distant past of our species in ways that can help us to build a better future. She received her Master’s degree from the University of Iowa and has studied fossil and human bone collections across five continents with major grant support from the National Science Foundation (United States) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Lindsay is currently an Archaeology PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand and is newly appointed as CARTA's Community Engagement & Advancement Director. For more information on how to Support CARTA, please contact Lindsay at (858) 246-0846 or khunter@ucsd.edu.

In 2013, Lindsay was one of six Advance Cave Archaeologists (nicknamed the "Underground Astronauts") chosen to excavate the newly discovered human relative, Homo naledi, from deep within the Rising Star cave system in the Cradle of Humankind (South Africa). The Rising Star Expedition, as it was called, was directed by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Prof Lee Berger, and received the South African National Research Foundation’s Science Team Award in 2014. From 2016-2019, Lindsay developed and managed the National Geographic-sponsored “Umsuka” Public Palaeoanthropology Project in Johannesburg, South Africa, and her personal educational and philanthropic work was spotlighted recently on a National Geographic Explorer advertisement aired on DSTV in Africa during 2018.