Handbook of Paleoanthropology

About

Winfried Henke is retired Academic Director and apl. Professor of Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He was born in 1944 in Pomerania Germany and studied biology anthropology geosciences as well as philosophy and pedagogy in Kiel and Braunschweig. In 1971 he received his Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Kiel his thesis focusing on a prehistoric anthropological topic and multivariate statistical analysis in skeletal biology. Since 1971 Henke conducted research and taught at the Faculty of Biology of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in paleoanthropology primatology prehistoric anthropology comparative morphology systematics demography sociobiology and scientific history. He had research activities in various countries (Iceland Israel Jordan US Greece) and in 1990 he habilitated with a monograph on the Anthropology of Upper Paleolithics and Mesolithics of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. In the scope of the ERASMUS docent exchange program intensive lecturing at numerous European Universities followed. Henke acted as elected anthropology referee for the German Research Foundation (DFG) and still serves at the advisory boards of scientific journals (e.g. Interdisziplinare Anthropologie published at Springer-Verlag); further he was book review editor and advisory consultant to museums e.g. the Neanderthal Museum (Germany). He published approximately 200 original papers in scientific journals and anthologies and several hundreds of book reviews and supervised more than 100 diplomas and Ph.D. theses in biological anthropology. He is author coauthor (together with H. Rothe) and editor of several books including such standard works as Palaoanthropologie Stammesgeschichte des Menschen and Phylogenetische Systematik (published at Springer-Verlag). In 2006 he was awarded the honorary doctorate of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; he is an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and Academician of the Leibniz-Sozietaet of Sciences. Ian Tattersall is Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Trained in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge and in geology and vertebrate paleontology at Yale he has worked on lemur systematics and ecology as well as in paleoanthropology where his special interest has been in hominid diversity and cognitive evolution. Most recently he has been concerned with trying to understand how a nonlinguistic and nonsymbolic ancestor gave rise to the cognitively unprecedented Homo sapiens and what drove the exceptionally fast evolution of the human lineage over the course of the Pleistocene. He has done both primatological and paleontological fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar Vietnam Surinam Yemen and Mauritius. In collaboration with Jeffrey Schwartz he wrote three volumes of The Hominid Fossil Record (2002-2005) a documentation in standardized descriptive and illustrative format of a large proportion of the most significant fossils that tell the human evolutionary story. Ian is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public with several trade books to his credit among them The Brain: Big Bangs Behaviors and Beliefs (2012 with Rob DeSalle) Masters of the Planet (2012) Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth (2011 with Rob DeSalle) The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE (2008) Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (1998) and The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution (1995 2nd ed. 2009) as well as many articles in Scientific American and Natural History and the coeditorship of the definitive Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory. He lectures widely and as curator has also been responsible for several major exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History including Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity (1984); Dark Caves Bright Visions: Life In Ice Age Europe (1986); Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors (1989); The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca (2003); and the highly acclaimed Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (1993) and its successor Hall of Human Origins (2007).