Jurmain holds an Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from University of California, Los Angeles and a Doctor of Philosophy in Biological Anthropology from Harvard. He joined the San Jose State faculty in 1975, and taught there until his retirement in 2004.
He is the author or coauthor of three textbooks on physical anthropology. In addition, his monograph Stories from the Skeleton: Behavioral Reconstruction in Human Osteology (Gordon and Breach, 1999, ) discusses the problem of determining what a person did, based only on markers in the person"s bones such as fractures or evidence of osteoarthritis. Jurmain demonstrates that much past inference of this type has been based on flawed or circular reasoning, and instead argues that a more rigorous approach to this sort of research is called foreign
