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Tim D. White (born August 24, 1950) is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for leading the team which discovered Ardi, the type specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor.
- Overview
- Career and discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus
- Later career and controversy
Tim D. White (born August 24, 1950, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American paleoanthropologist whose findings of ancient hominid remains in Africa helped clarify the early stages of human evolution.
The passion for hunting ancient remains came to White at a young age. He spent much time in his early years around Lake Arrowhead, California, scouring Native American campsites for artifacts. After studying anthropology and biology at the University of California, Riverside, he earned a Ph.D. in biological anthropology in 1977 from the University of Michigan and went on to become a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
White developed his interest in Africa during his years as a graduate student, when he took part in an expedition to Tanzania headed by anthropologist Richard Leakey. He later worked with Leakey’s mother, Mary Douglas Leakey, studying fossilized hominin footprints. White continued his engagement with Africa, returning to the continent many times over the following decades. Some of his most significant finds were made in the early 1990s in the middle Awash River valley of northern Ethiopia; in Maka, a town to the west of the archaeological site of Aramis, he uncovered the 3.4-million-year-old remains of Australopithecus afarensis, a hominin species of which specimens (including the famous partial skeleton Lucy) had been discovered earlier in Ethiopia and Tanzania. White’s find helped quell the controversy over whether the specimens from the two countries were indeed of one species.
In 1995 White changed departments at the University of California, Berkeley, leaving the department of anthropology, where he had worked as a professor since 1978, to become distinguished chair in life and physical sciences and professor of integrative biology. He also became a research paleoanthropologist and director for the Human Evolution Research Center. White was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000.
In 2020 White disclosed to the university a collection of human remains he and previous professors had used for teaching. The disclosure came during a search for human remains for possible repatriation in compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The university’s analysis concluded that the decades-old teaching collection contained the remains of a number of individuals who were likely to have been Native American, leading some to criticize White for not disclosing the collection prior to the search. However, White contended that he acted correctly according to the law since the bones in the collection lacked the documentation necessary to confirm their origin.
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- Mary Jane Friedrich
Phone: (510) 642-2889. Full Contact Information > Research Description. My research into multiple dimensions of human evolution emphasizes field and laboratory studies designed to acquire new data on the skeletal biology, environmental context, and behavior of hominids spanning the Neogene.
Tim White, Professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, joins host Harry Kreisler for a discussion of how science is changing our understanding of mankind's origins.
- 54 min
- 13.2K
- University of California Television (UCTV)
Tim D. White's 153 research works with 11,812 citations and 35,012 reads, including: Endocranial ontogeny and evolution in early Homo sapiens : The evidence from Herto, Ethiopia.
Research Interests. I study human origins and evolution in the contexts of past biological and cultural environments. To more completely understand the human past I work with a large international team, gathering data from geology, biology, paleontology, and archaeology. I have worked in these disciplines in both laboratory and field capacities ...
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Tim D. White is Professor of Integrative Biology and Director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He also codirects the Middle Awash research project in Ethiopia and is Faculty Curator in Biological Anthropology at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
