{"id":16895,"date":"2025-04-02T22:01:42","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T22:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/ralph-holloway-anthropologist-who-studied-brains-evolution-dies-at-90\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T22:01:42","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T22:01:42","slug":"ralph-holloway-anthropologist-who-studied-brains-evolution-dies-at-90","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/ralph-holloway-anthropologist-who-studied-brains-evolution-dies-at-90\/","title":{"rendered":"Ralph Holloway, Anthropologist Who Studied Brain\u2019s Evolution, Dies at 90"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist who pioneered the idea that changes in brain structure, and not just size, were critical in the evolution of humans, died on March 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His death was announced by Columbia University\u2019s anthropology department, where he taught for nearly 50 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Holloway\u2019s contrarian idea was that it wasn\u2019t necessarily the big brains of humans that distinguished them from apes or primitive ancestors. Rather, it was the way human brains were organized.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Brains from several million years ago don\u2019t exist. But Dr. Holloway\u2019s singular focus on casts of the interiors of skull fossils, which he usually made out of latex, allowed him to override this hurdle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He \u201ccompulsively collected\u201d information from these casts, he <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.annualreviews.org\/content\/journals\/10.1146\/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085211\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">wrote<\/a> in a 2008 paper. Crucially, they offered a representation of the brain\u2019s exterior edges, which allowed scientists to get a sense of the brain\u2019s structure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Using a so-called <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/27\/science\/27prof.html\" title=\"\">endocast<\/a>, Dr. Holloway was able to establish conclusively, for instance, that a famous and controversial two-million-year-old hominid fossil skull from a South Africa limestone quarry, known as the Taung child, belonged to one of mankind\u2019s distant ancestors.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The Taung child\u2019s brain was small, leading many to doubt the conclusion of <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1988\/11\/23\/obituaries\/raymond-a-dart-is-dead-at-95-leader-in-study-of-human-origins.html\" title=\"\">Raymond Dart<\/a>, the anatomist who discovered it in the 1920s, that it was a human ancestor.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In 1969, Dr. Holloway took his family to South Africa to meet the elderly Dr. Dart, to examine the natural limestone endocast that the Taung child\u2019s positioning in the quarry had created and to make an endocast of his own.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI became convinced that the Taung endocast needed independent study,\u201d he wrote in 2008, in order to \u201cfind an objective method(s) for deciding whether the cortex was reorganized as Dart had previously claimed,\u201d so many years before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Holloway focused on a crescent-shaped furrow, called the lunate sulcus, at the back of the endocast. In his view, it was positioned like a human\u2019s, which suggested to him that Dr. Dart had been right all along.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Others in the field had insisted that the Taung lunate sulcus was in a \u201ctypical ape anterior position,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">By now, the conclusions made by Dr. Holloway and Dr. Dart about the lunate sulcus have largely been accepted: The Taung child is a human ancestor.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIf you can define where it is and prove it, then you can really demonstrate that it is an aspect of reorganization,\u201d Dr. Holloway <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.archaeology.org\/0709\/etc\/conversation.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">told<\/a> an interviewer for Archaeology magazine in 2007.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">That concept \u2014 the brain\u2019s structure rather than its volume \u2014 was the decisive factor in proving human ancestry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI was taking the position, as had Dart before me, that reorganization took place prior to the increase in brain volume,\u201d Dr. Holloway wrote in 2008.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI believed then and remain convinced today that the earliest hominids, i.e., <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">Australopithecus<\/em> <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">africanus<\/em>, <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">A. afarensis<\/em>, <em class=\"css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0\">and A. garhi<\/em>, had brains that were definitely different from any ape\u2019s, despite their small size,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Early in his career, he had decided, unlike many of his peers, that the mere study of apes wasn\u2019t enough. \u201cI could not fathom using baboons as a theoretical model for understanding human evolution because I regarded each species as a terminal end product of their own line of evolutionary development,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">It was humans, and the fossils of their ancestors, that needed to be the focus. \u201cHe was very important in paleoanthropology, in bringing the study of brain evolution from being a marginal enterprise to the center,\u201d said Chet C. Sherwood, a biological anthropologist at the George Washington University, in an interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cAnd he did it by innovating methods for reconstructing cranial morphology,\u201d said Dr. Sherwood, who studied under Dr. Holloway at Columbia in the 1990s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The confrontation between Dr. Holloway and his \u201creorganization\u201d partisans, on the one hand, and neuroanthopologists who insisted that Taung and similar specimens were more likely apes, on the other, could become \u201cextremely emotionally charged,\u201d Dr. Holloway wrote. Of one such encounter, he wrote that \u201cfortunately, at 430 ml, the endocasts could not do much damage even if thrown, despite being made of plaster.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Holloway was in some respects a traditional anthropologist, committed to what the discipline once called the \u201cfour fields\u201d of anthropology: archaeology and cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology. But that multidisciplinary approach has long fallen out of favor, with biologists increasingly pushed aside.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI was quickly isolated and marginalized at Columbia, and remain so,\u201d he wrote in 2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was further isolated when he defended the educational psychologist <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/11\/02\/science\/arthur-r-jensen-who-set-off-debate-on-iq-dies.html\" title=\"\">Arthur R. Jensen<\/a>, remembered for a deeply contested 1969 Harvard Educational Review article positing a genetic explanation for a divergence in I.Q. scores between Black and white people. One fellow anthropologist called him a \u201cracist,\u201d Dr. Holloway wrote, after \u201cI had the temerity to defend Arthur Jensen\u201d from an \u201cassertion that Jensen was a bigot.\u201d Some who knew him said the charge was deeply unfair.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-7\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ralph Leslie Holloway Jr. was born on Feb. 6, 1935, in Philadelphia, to Ralph Holloway, who was in the insurance business, and Marguerite (Grugan) Holloway, a secretary. He attended high school in Philadelphia and enrolled in Drexel Institute of Technology\u2019s metallurgical engineering program.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He later moved with his family to Albuquerque, where he studied anthropology and geology at the University of New Mexico, graduating in 1959 with a degree in geology.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After working for a time in the oil fields of southwest Texas and for Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, Calif., he entered the graduate program in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in 1964. That year, he was recruited by Columbia as an assistant professor, and he remained there until his retirement in 2003.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was the author of or contributed to several books, including \u201cThe Role of Human Social Behavior in the Evolution of the Brain\u201d (1975).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-8\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dr. Holloway is survived by his daughter, Marguerite Holloway, and two grandchildren. Two sons, Eric and Benjamin, and his first and second wives, Louise Holloway and Daisy Dwyer, are deceased.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-9\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">For his entire career, Dr. Holloway remained focused on a single organ, the brain, and on the three-dimensional modeling he perfected to study its development.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cBecause the human brain is the most important constructor of experience and reality, it would be important to know how it came to its present state,\u201d he explained at the end of his career.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cEndocasts, i.e., the casts made of the internal table of bone of the cranium, are rather impoverished objects,\u201d he continued, \u201cto achieve such an understanding, but these are all we have of the direct evolutionary history of our brains and should not be ignored.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/02\/science\/ralph-holloway-dead.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist who pioneered the idea that changes in brain structure, and not just size, were critical in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[1317,5351,1068,441,299,322,5348,5350,323,5349,1786],"class_list":["post-16895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-archaeology-and-anthropology","tag-arthur-r-1923-2012","tag-brain","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-evolution-biology","tag-fossils","tag-holloway","tag-jensen","tag-paleontology","tag-ralph","tag-skull-body-part"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Ralph Holloway, Anthropologist Who Studied Brain\u2019s Evolution, Dies at 90 - World News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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