Anthropology.net

Claude Lévi-Strauss died two days ago. He was 100 years old.

I shouldn’t have to write about his impact to the field of anthropology, in summary it was profound. He authored many texts. He set forth structuralism, a mode of thought by which we can compare relationships between social systems. His contributions to studying cultures and anthropology were deep and he will be missed.

From John Lynch, of Stranger Fruit, comes the upsetting news of Charles Lockwood‘s untimely death. He died in a motorcycle accident in London.

For those that don’t know who Charles Lockwood was, he was a paleoanthropologist who investigated the evolution of skull anatomy in hominins. Last year, his book “The Human Story: Where We Come From & How We Evolved,” came out. John Lynch has had the pleasure to do research with him, and has posted several citations where he and Locwood, along with Bill Kimbel published their geometric analysis of temporal bone variation in hominins. Do check them out.

Unfortunately, I never met Charles but have read almost a dozen of his papers. The last paper I remember reading of his was his July 2007 study with Claire Terhune and Bill Kimbel — where they concluded that their comparative sample of 520 extant and fossil hominid temporal bones indicated that H. erectus exhibited more intraspecific variation than other hominids. I was impressed with this paper and have always understood him to be an archetypal, high quality anatomist and field scientist — someone who inspired me. He will be missed.