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October 28, 2005|Volume 34, Number 9


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Andrew Hill



Anthropologist Hill is designated
as Stephenson Professor

Andrew Hill, the recently appointed Clayton Stephenson Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology, focuses his teaching and research on human evolution, with particular emphasis on the environmental and ecological context in which it occurred.

The chair of the Department of Anthropology since 2000 and curator of anthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History since 1992, Hill has conducted fieldwork in eastern Africa, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. For many years he has been director of the Baringo Paleontological Research Project, a multidisciplinary research program operating in the Tugen Hills, Kenya, that explores hominoid evolution in environments in the late Neogene of Africa.

In 1992, Hill and his colleagues identified the oldest known skull in the human family and established its age to be about 2.4 million years old. The skull fragment had been unearthed decades earlier in Kenya near Lake Baringo and was kept in the National Museum of Kenya. Hill and his team established its age by analyzing the rocks in the strata where the fossil was originally found.

From 1984 to 1995, Hill took part in yearly expeditions in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to investigate fossils there and compare them with fossils in Pakistan and Kenya for clues about whether species evolved in response to major global climate change.

Hill has written numerous articles and abstracts and has co-edited several scientific publications, including "Fossil Vertebrates of Arabia" and "Fossils in the Making: Taphonomy and Vertebrate Paleoecology." In 2002, he was guest editor of a special two-volume issue of the Journal of Human Evolution dedicated to the work of his Kenyan expeditions.

A native of England, Hill earned his B.S. from the University of Reading and his Ph.D. from Bedford College, University of London. After graduating, he was a research officer for the National Museums of Kenya and later a research fellow, then administrative director, of The International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory in Nairobi, Kenya. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in anthropology at Harvard University and a research associate in Harvard's Peabody Museum before coming to Yale as an assistant professor in 1985. He was named a full professor in 1992.

This year, Hill was also named head of the Anthropology Division at the Yale Peabody Museum. He was curator-in-charge of the museum's permanent exhibition on human evolution titled "Fossil Fragments."

Hill has served on the editorial board of Oxford University Press' Human Evolution Series since 1999. He has also been a consultant and reviewer for publishers of various popular and academic publications, and was a participant in the A&E/Granada television series on human evolution hosted by Walter Cronkite in 1994.

In recognition of his undergraduate teaching, Hill received the Yale College-Lex Hixon '63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences in 1994.


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Memorial service for Abraham S. Goldstein

A call for action

Campus Notes


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