Howells, William W. 1908–2005

(William White Howells)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 27, 1908, in New York, NY; died December 20, 2005, in Kittery Point, ME. Anthropologist, educator, and author. Howells was a Harvard professor emeritus best known for his landmark research that definitively indicated that modern humans throughout the world are all members of the same species. Coming from a family of prestigious personalities—his grandfathers were novelist and critic William Dean Howells and journalist Horace White, while his father was architect John Mead Howells—he was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under Earnest Albert Hooten and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1934. After university, he worked for the American Museum of Natural History as a researcher for five years, then joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His time there was interrupted by World War II, during which he enlisted as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, serving in intelligence stateside. While still in the military, he published his first authored work, Mankind So Far (1944). Returning to the University of Wisconsin after the war, he remained there until 1954. When Hooten passed away, Harvard asked Howells to replace his mentor as anthropology professor. As a Harvard professor, Howells began conducting his comprehensive study in the mid-1960s. With the assistance of his wife, he collected skulls from around the world. Carefully measuring and analyzing each one, he compiled data that proved there was little variation between the samples, illustrating that all humans on the globe belonged to the same species in advance of the time DNA analysis would prove this irrefutably. Howells continued throughout his career to make human evolution his main focus of study, also contributing to the debate on how Homo sapiens migrated and spread across the globe (he believed it was most likely that modern humans emerged out of Africa and eventually displaced competing species such as the Neanderthals). After retiring as professor emeritus in 1974, Howells continued to write and publish for many more years. Among his publications are Mankind in the Making (1959; revised edition, 1967), Evolution of the Genus Homo (1973), Skull Shapes and the Map (1989), Getting Here: The Story of Human Evolution (1993), and Who's Who in Skulls: Ethnic Identification of Crania from Measurements (1995).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, January 3, 2006, section 3, p. 7.

New York Times, December 30, 2005, p. C13.

Times (London, England), January 17, 2006, p. 65.

Washington Post, December 29, 2005, p. B6.