In Memoriam: Ray Harryhausen

According to the LA Times Ray Harryhausen has passed away. He will be missed.

In Memoriam: Carl R. Woese

Woese was 84. More can be found here and here.

Hat Tip to Sparc

In Memoriam: Phillip Tobias – A Giant Passes

Phillip Tobias passed away today according to the University of the Witwatersrand. He was 86. Tobias was a giant in the field of paleoanthropology having studied both the East African fossil material- his monographs on Zinjanthropous and Homo habilis were masterpieces – and the South African fossil material – most notably at Sterkfontein. He was interested in the evolution of the human brain – The Brain in Hominid Evolution is a must read. According to wikipedia he also studied

…the Kalahari San, the Tonga people of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and numerous black tribes of Southern Africa.

I learned some interesting things about Tobias from here.

A South African colleague, archaeologist Lyn Wadley, said Tobias also should be remembered for speaking out against apartheid.

In 1986, during a period that saw clashes between anti-apartheid activists and the white racist government’s security forces that some historians have compared to civil war, Tobias spoke at a university meeting that drew thousands of students and staff members. He and others urged the government to free detainees and end a state of emergency that gave it broad powers to crack down on protests and dissent.

“Today, in the emergency, freedom is under siege as never before,” Tobias said.

Wadley said Thursday: “The thing that I really admired so much is that during the darkest ages of South Africa, when he could have got a job anywhere in the world, he chose to stay here, because this was his country, where he could make a difference.”

That takes courage.

Wadley said Tobias would ask his first-year students to send him their photographs before classes started. He would memorize names and faces, and greet scores of students by name during the first class, she said.

“That was sort of symptomatic of his love of people,” she said.

I don’t know many people that would do that.

And finally:

In a statement, South African President Jacob Zuma lauded Tobias for leading the nation’s efforts to reclaim the remains of Saartjie Bartmann, a South African slave who was taken to Europe and displayed in life and then in death as an ethnological curiosity — known as the “Hottentot Venus” — in the 19th century.

Bartmann’s fate has come to symbolize Europe’s arrogance and racism in its relationship with Africa. After becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994, Nelson Mandela asked that her remains be taken from a French museum and brought to South Africa. After years of negotiations led by Tobias, Bartmann was brought home in 2002 and buried in southeastern South Africa. Her grave has been declared a national heritage site.

More here.

In Memoriam: Alan Thorne

I recently learned that Alan Thorne passed away on May 21, 2012, due to Alzheimers Disease. Thorne was an ardent proponent of multiregional continuity and coauthored a number of papers with Milford Wolpoff on the subject. (See here for one of Thorne’s early papers on the subject). Additionally, as the wikipedia article indicates, Thorne worked Lake Mungo and Kow Swamp. Not mentioned in the wikipedia article, or in any of the obituaries I have run across, is his work with snakes. How do snakes relate to human evolution? See here. He will be missed.

Obituaries
The Age
ABC News
The Telegraph

In Memoriam: Davey Jones

Bummer. Davey Jones, lead singer of the Monkees, has passed away. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Christopher Hitchens: In Memoriam

The world has become a little poorer today.

In Memoriam: Lewis Binford

SMU’s website is reporting that Lewis Binford has passed away. Binford passed away on 04/11 in Kirksville, Missouri. From SMU:

Binford first gained attention in 1962 as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago when he wrote a path-breaking article in American Antiquity proposing that archaeologists abandon their emphasis on cataloguing artifacts and instead study what the artifacts revealed about prehistoric cultures. The proposition launched what is now known as “New Archaeology.”

“Lewis Binford led the charge that pushed, pulled and otherwise cajoled archaeology into becoming a more scientific enterprise,” says David Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at SMU. “The impact of his work was felt not only here in America, but around the world. Much of how we conceptualize and carry out archaeology in the 21st century is owed to Lew’s substantial legacy.”

Update One 04/15/11: Also, see Abnormal Interests, Archaeoblog, and Bone Girl.

In Memoriam: George Williams

I am sure that most of my readers have heard that George Williams has passed away. Williams, for those of you who are unfamiliar with him, was one of the giants of evolutionary biology. His book Adaptation and Natural Selection is one of the must read classics in the field – and certainly one anthropologists of all stripes should be read. His paper Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence, for example, contains the the first outline of the grandmother hypothesis – something paleoanthropologists have been arguing about for years. Williams was also concerned with the evolution of sex and a pioneer in the field of evolutionary medicine.

Update 1: Carl Zimmer has a piece that explains how all these different strands come together in Williams work.

In Memoriam: Lena Horne

Rest in Peace

In Memoriam: Frank Frazetta

Rest in Peace