(Utilizing and expanding the database presented in his ear...)
Utilizing and expanding the database presented in his earlier monographs Cranial Variation in Man and Skull Shapes and the Map, Howells develops methods for allocating a human skull to one of 28 modern populations for historical or forensic purposes.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0873652096/?tag=2022091-20
(A comprehensive and authoritative book on evolution.)
A comprehensive and authoritative book on evolution.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0999185101/?tag=2022091-20
William White Howells was born on November 27, 1908, in New York City, United States, the son of the architect John Mead Howells (1868 - 1959) and the grandson of William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920), the literary critic, novelist, and close friend and adviser of Samuel Clements (Mark Twain).
After attending St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, he entered Harvard University, where he studied anthropology under Earnest Albert Hooton (1877 - 1954), and in 1934 he received the Ph. D. degree in physical anthropology for his dissertation, The Peopling of Melanesia as indicated by cranial evidence from the Bismarck Archipelago.
Following a period as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1934 - 1939), Howells was appointed assistant professor in the then Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin (Madison).
In 1943 he was commissioned a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy and assigned to Naval Intelligence (Far East Division) in Washington, D. C. He returned to Wisconsin in 1946 as an associate professor and was made a full professor of anthropology there in 1948.
He left Wisconsin in 1954, upon succeeding Hooton as professor of anthropology at Harvard University. After 1974 he was anthropologist emeritus at Harvard.
While at Wisconsin Howells produced three of his most successful and influential books, namely Mankind So Far (1944), The Heathens (1948), and Back of History (1954), which reflect the breadth of his anthropological knowledge and interests.
Between 1939 and 1943 he served as secretary-treasurer of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA), and from 1949 to 1954 as editor of its publication, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. In 1951 he was elected president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
He also played an active role in the affairs of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council and was later a member of the first advisory panel for anthropology (Division of Biological and Medical Sciences) of the National Science Foundation.
Between 1966 and 1972 he participated in the Harvard Solomon Islands Project and was responsible for conducting an intensive study of the medical and biological variation of several native communities, such as Lau Lagoon and Baegu. Drawing on the results of his own researches and those of other workers in physical anthropology, as well as the discoveries of recent archaeological and linguistic investigations, he published in 1973 a major synthesis of the prehistory of the Pacific region: The Pacific Islanders. His later work involved multivariate analysis of cranial series in studies of the origins of the Chinese (1983) and the Japanese and Polynesians (1981).
Drawing attention to the need for more reliable analytical techniques in anthropometry, he began with the demonstration in the early 1950 of how factorial analysis may be applied to anthropometric data to specify parameters of components making up the human physique. Later in the decade he applied this approach to the problem of variation in cranial morphology and showed that "10 measurements account for virtually all of the correlation in the cranial vault proper. "
Shortly thereafter he turned to multivariate analysis and embarked on a long-range program of research to determine racial affiliation of human crania and their respective ranges of variation. This work culminated with the publication of his book Cranial Variation in Man (1973). Since then, he has published Skull Shapes and the Map (1989); Getting Here: The Story of Human Evolution (1993); and Who's Who in Skulls (1995).
Howells' major research foci within the wide range of his anthropological interests: the anthropology of Oceania and general human evolution. His most famous books: Cranial Variation in Man (1973), Skull Shapes and the Map (1989); Getting Here: The Story of Human Evolution (1993). Parallely Howells also endowed the directorship of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard.
Howells received a number of prestigious awards, including the Wenner-Gren Viking Medal in physical anthropology (1955), the AAA Distinguished Service Award (1978), and the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris Broca Prix du Centennaire (1980). He received the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement award in 1992.
(Utilizing and expanding the database presented in his ear...)
(A comprehensive and authoritative book on evolution.)
Howells throughout his career gave critical attention to the improvement of methods applied to the study of both skeletal and living populations.
He focused on the question of the origins of anatomically modern (a. m. ) humans, and in particular on the issue of whether all living populations had a single origin (in the late Pleistocene), or whether they evolved in many different regions from local archaic populations.
In contrast to the views of such workers as Franz Weidenreich (1873 - 1948) and Carleton Coon (1904 - 1981), who argued for an essentially polycentric origin for a. m. Homo sapiens (1976), Howells contended that the variation of recent people is primarily the result of dispersion from a common source. In taking this position, he was critical of the idea of a polytypic Neanderthal stage as the antecedent to modern humans. While acknowledging the possibility of some admixture between Neanderthals and essentially a. m. Homo sapiens populations of the Upper Paleolithic Howells considered this admixture as modest - if at all. The presence of such traits at Skhul have been taken by some workers as evidence of direct descent from Neanderthals or of hybridization with Neanderthals.
Quotations: Howells wrote: "Though it is entirely likely that Neanderthal genes survive, general aspects of facial and cranial shape fail completely to sustain either idea. In fact, multivariate analysis of measurements makes a strong distinction between Neanderthals and modern crania. " (Evolution of the Genus Homo, 1973).
Howells was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA), as well as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He had a wife Muriel Seabury.
