Francis Clark Howell
| Francis Clark Howell | |
|---|---|
| Born |
November 27, 1925 Kansas City, Missouri |
| Died | March 10, 2007 (aged 81) Berkeley, California |
| Other names | F. Clark Howell |
| Residence | United States |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Physical Anthropology, Archeology, Paleontology |
| Institutions |
University of Chicago University of California at Berkeley |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Known for | human evolutionary development in Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania), Asia (Turkey), Europe (Spain); considered the father of the modern integrative approach to human evolutionary studies |
| Notable awards | Leakey Prize (LSB Leakey Foundation); Darwin Award); Fellows' Medal; Member of National Academy of Science (USA) and French and British science academies. |
Francis Clark Howell (November 27, 1925 – March 10, 2007), generally known as F. Clark Howell, was an American anthropologist. He altered the landscape of his discipline irrevocably by adding a broad spectrum of modern sciences to the traditional "stones and bones" approach of the past and is considered the father of modern paleo-anthropology.[1]
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, F. Clark Howell grew up in Kansas, where he became interested in natural history. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, from 1944 to 1946 in the Pacific Theater. Howell was educated at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees under the tutelage of Sherwood L. Washburn.
Dr. Howell died of metastatic lung cancer on March 10, 2007 at age 81 at his home in Berkeley, California.
Howell began his career in the Anatomy Department of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1953, and stayed there for only two years before moving back to his alma mater, the University of Chicago. He went on to spend the next 25 years of his career there in the Department of Anthropology. He achievedk a professorship in 1962 and became chairman of the department in 1966. In 1970, Howell moved to the University of California, Berkeley following his mentor Washburn. This time he stayed for good, remaining a professor and then an emeritus until his death.
Howell's early work focused on Homo neanderthalensis for which he made trips to Europe beginning in 1953. His later work brought him to Africa, the cradle of mankind. From 200to 1958, he worked at Isimila, Tanzania, where he recovered enormous hand-axes dating from the Acheulean (260,000 years old). Continuing his study of the Acheulean period he excavated in Spain (1961 to 1963) at the sites of Torralba and Ambrona which are 300,000 to 400,000 years old. At none of these sites did he find skeletal material however. That had to wait until he worked on lower deposits dating from 2.1 - 0.1 Mya in the Omo River region of southern Ethiopia. There he found vertebrate fossils of monkeys as well as hominids. It was here that he also pioneered new dating methods based on potassium-argon radioisotope techniques.
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