Joseph Birdsell

Joseph Benjamin Birdsell (30 March 1908 – 5 March 1994) of Harvard University and UCLA was an anthropologist who studied Australian Aborigines.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, he earned his degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He made his first field study in the Australian outback in 1938 and returned periodically to study microevolutionary processes. Together with Norman Tindale, in field-work over 1938-29 in the Cairns rainforest, concluded that the indigenous 'pygmy' tribes there, which they collectively called Barrineans, belonged to a group that were genetically distinct from the majority of Australian aborigines, perhaps related to the Tasmanian people. A photo exists showing Joseph Birdsell, height (six feet one inch), with a twenty-four-year-old male of the Gungganydji tribe (4 feet, 6 inches), taken at the Mona Mona Mission, near Kuranda

He completed his doctoral degree at Harvard in 1941.

After teaching briefly at the State College of Washington, he served as an Army Air Corps officer in World War II. He taught anthropology at UCLA from 1948 until his retirement in 1974, continuing his research, and writing many articles and a widely used textbook on human evolution. His lifework was summarised in a monograph published in 1993 by Oxford University Press.

He died on 5 March 1994 in Santa Barbara of bone cancer.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946, and several of his field seasons in the Australia were financed by the Carnegie Corporation. He had a productive 50-year collaboration with Norman Tindale of the South Australian Museum and University of Adelaide.

He also collaborated with U.S. physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton.

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