LAUSR

With the death of Geoffrey Ainsworth Harrison on September 14, 2017, Human Biology lost the last of a distinguished group of international scholars who innovated a new scientific approach to the study of human variation after World War II, and who contributed mightily to the subsequent International Biological Programme (IBP) that laid the foundations for much of today’s human biological research. In his autobiographical article in the Annual Review of Anthropology (2010), Harrison eloquently expounded on a career that took him from “Bones to Hormones” and featured some interesting investigational turns that probed the genetics and adaptation of mice and men. A poignant reminder of the relative youth of Biological Anthropology is the event that brought Harrison into it as an undergraduate: a lecture from legendary Robert Broom on Australopithecus. Ironically, in his first formal employment as a temporary department demonstrator in the Anatomy Department at Oxford University, he was complicit in validating the Australopithecus narrative by helping to debunk Piltdown man. Under the instruction of Joseph Weiner, he re-created a good imitation of the Piltdown jaw, providing the conclusive evidence that the specimen was fraudulent (Harrison, 2010)! His emergence as a human biologist came in the 1950s when he began his lifelong study into the causes and consequences of the variation and evolution of living human populations. Oddly enough, this interest brought him to the study of mice, because with them he could explore whether Bergman’s and Allen’s rules applied with regard to developmental and generational variation, something he couldn’t do in long-lived humans (see Harrison, 1958, 1963). His interests in environmental effects on human variation led him to the IBP and, along with E. John Clegg, he conducted a study of altitude adaption in the populations of the Simien Plateau in Ethiopia. His research plan for high-altitude migrants is a must read for anyone interested in natural experimentation (Harrison, 1966). His first academic position was at the University of Liverpool where he conducted studies of skin color variation using reflectance spectrometry (Harrison & Owen, 1964). He returned to the University of Oxford in the early 1960s, and remained there for the rest of his academic career, rising to Professor of Biological Anthropology in 1976. At Oxford, he helped establish the Diploma in Human Biology (1964), the Department of Biological Anthropology (1976, later, the Institute of Biological Anthropology), and the M.Sc. in Human Biology (1979). Throughout his career Harrison was involved in numerous human genetic studies that took him around the world. He extracted data from groups in numerous remote places, often under circumstances that might be described as dicey. But Harrison’s interests were broad and his studies encompassed most everything of interest in human population biology, from environmental adaptation to growth and development. A key component in all his work was the recognition that sociocultural processes play an important role in understanding human biological variation. His thinking on the relationships between biology and behavior is elegantly presented in The Human Biology of the English Village (Harrison, 1995), a project that began with an idea germinated while drinking a beer with a local vicar in 1965. From his discussions with the vicar, Harrison realized that the complete parish records Geoffrey A. Harrison in the Australian Outback