Education
Cook studied at Harvard University and served in France during World War I. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy thesis, The Toxicity of the Heavy Metals in Relation to Respiration, in 1925.
Cook studied at Harvard University and served in France during World War I. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy thesis, The Toxicity of the Heavy Metals in Relation to Respiration, in 1925.
He was also a noted pioneer in population studies of the native peoples of North America and Mesoamerica and in field methods and quantitative analysis in archaeology. He taught physiology at Berkeley from 1928 until his retirement in 1966. Cook repeatedly returned to the problems of estimating the pre-Columbian populations of California, Mexico, and other regions, and of tracing the rate and reasons for their subsequent decline.
He often arrived at higher figures for pre-contact populations than had previous scholars, and his work has not escaped criticism within this controversial field (eg, West Michael Mathes 2005).