THE experience of women from the earliest days of humanity until today will be discussed as part of an event at the Bradford branch of Waterstones tomorrow.

Woman in Time, held to co-incide with British Science Week, is an exploration of humanity and involves poetry and spoken word performance to tell stories of three women. One is a Neanderthal, now known as Tabun, whose people may have been the first to encounter our own species on its excursion out of Africa over 120,000 years ago. Her skull and skeleton were discovered in 1932, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, Israel, by young Cambridge graduate Jacquetta Hawkes and local Palestinian archaeologist Yusra. Jacquetta became a successful archaeologist, science communicator, playwright and poet as well as a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her most admired poem, Man in Time, vividly describes her emotional awakening during the excavation at Mount Carmel. Jacquetta’s archive of manuscripts, letters and photographs is a great treasure of the University of Bradford.

Yusra had hoped to take up a Newnham College Fellowship at Cambridge, but her life fell prey to the tumultuous history of the Middle East and after her village was de-populated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and she disappeared.Dr Tori Herridge of the Natural History Museum and Alison Cullingford, University of Bradford Special Collections, will tell of the excavation and explore the science, at 7pm. To book a place, visit http://woman-in-time.eventbrite.com