C. Loring Brace
Encyclopedia
C. Loring Brace is an anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

 at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

. He considers the attempt "to introduce a Darwinian outlook into biological anthropology" to be his greatest contribution to the field of anthropology.http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/brace_c_loring.html

Life and work

Charles Loring Brace IV was born in Hanover
Hanover, New Hampshire
Hanover is a town along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 11,260 at the 2010 census. CNN and Money magazine rated Hanover the sixth best place to live in America in 2011, and the second best in 2007....

, New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...

 in 1930, a son of the writer, sailor, boat builder and teacher, Gerald Warner Brace
Gerald Warner Brace
Gerald Warner Brace was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England.-Early life and ancestors:...

 and Hulda Potter Laird. His ancestors were New England schoolteachers and clergymen including, John P. Brace, Sarah Pierce
Sarah Pierce
Sarah Pierce was a teacher, educator and founder of one the earliest schools for girls in the United States, the Litchfield Female Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut. The school having been established in her house in 1792 became known as the Litchfield Female Academy in 1827...

, and the Rev. Blackleach Burritt
Blackleach Burritt
Blackleach Burritt was a preacher during the American Revolutionary War. During the American War of Independence, he was incarcerated in the Sugar House Prison-Early life and ancestors:...

. Brace's paternal great-grandfather, Charles Loring Brace
Charles Loring Brace
Charles Loring Brace was a contributing philanthropist in the field of social reform...

, had worked to introduce evolution theory to America and had even corresponded with Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

. C. Loring Brace developed an early interest in biology and human evolution as a child in part by reading Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia...

's popular book Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945). He entered Williams College in Williamstown
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Williamstown is a town in Berkshire County, in the northwest corner of Massachusetts. It shares a border with Vermont to the north and New York to the west. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 7,754 at the 2010 census...

, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

, but the college did not offer a degree in anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, so Brace constructed his own major from geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

, paleontology
Paleontology
Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...

, and biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 courses.

Brace entered Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1952 and studied physical anthropology
Physical anthropology
Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...

 with Ernest Hooton and later with William Howells, who introduced Brace to the new evolutionary synthesis
Modern evolutionary synthesis
The modern evolutionary synthesis is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution...

 of Darwinian evolution
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....

 and population genetics
Population genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...

. During this time he was also able to travel to Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 where he spent 1959-1960 at Oxford University, in the animal behavior
Ethology
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....

 laboratory of Niko Tinbergen, and traveled to Zagreb
Zagreb
Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...

, Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

, where he inspected the collection of Neanderthal fossils
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...

 collected by Dragutin Gorjanovic-Kramberger at Krapina
Krapina
Krapina is a town in northern Croatia and the administrative centre of Krapina-Zagorje County with a population of 4,482 and a total municipality population of 12,479...

.

Brace completed his Ph.D. in 1962. He taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and then at the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...

. He has spent much of his career as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and as Curator of Biological Anthropology at the university's Museum of Anthropology.

Neanderthal studies

In 1962, Brace published a paper in American Anthropologist titled "Refocusing on the Neanderthal Problem" where he argued, in opposition to French anthropologist Henri Vallois
Henri Victor Vallois
Henri Victor Vallois was a French anthropologist and paleontologist.He was one of the editor in chief of the Revue d'Anthropologie from 1932 to 1970, and director of the Musée de l'Homme in 1950.- Bibliography :...

, that the archeological and fossil evidence did not necessarily support the idea that the Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...

s were replaced by Cro-Magnon
Cro-Magnon
The Cro-Magnon were the first early modern humans of the European Upper Paleolithic. The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiometrically dated to 35,000 years before present....

 populations migrating into Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, rather than being ancestral to early Homo sapiens.

Brace continued his reappraisal of the Neanderthal problem in 1964 in "The Fate of the 'Classic' Neanderthals: a consideration of hominid catastrophism" published in Current Anthropology. Here Brace traced the history of research on the Neanderthals in order to show how interpretations established early in the century by Marcellin Boule and notions such as Arthur Keith's
Arthur Keith
Sir Arthur Keith was a Scottish anatomist and anthropologist, who became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and Hunterian Professor and conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London...

 pre-sapiens theory had convinced many anthropologists that the Neanderthals played little or no role in the evolution of modern humans. Brace argued that cultural factors, especially the increased use of tools by Neanderthals, produced morphological changes that led the classic Neanderthals to evolve into modern humans.

Brace has remained a vigorous proponent of the idea that Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...

s are ancestral to modern humans. He also argued that the fossil record suggests a simple evolutionary scheme whereby humans have evolved through four stages (Australopithecine
Australopithecine
The term australopithecine refers generally to any species in the related genera Australopithecus or Paranthropus. These species occurred in the Plio-Pleistocene era, and were bipedal and dentally similar to humans, but with a brain size not much larger than modern apes, lacking the...

, Pithecanthropine, Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...

, and Modern humans
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

), and that these stages are somewhat arbitrary and reflect our limited knowledge of the fossil record. Brace has emphasized the need to integrate the ideas of Darwinian evolution into palaeoanthropology. Much earlier research into human origins relied on non-Darwinian models of evolution; Brace's presented his advocacy of the Darwinian approach in The Stages Of Human Evolution, first published in 1967.

Brace's ideas have generated considerable controversy, as much for his brash criticism of his colleagues as for their content, but they have also influenced a generation of anthropological research into human evolution and the interpretation of the Neanderthals.

Other studies

In the publication "Clines and clusters versus Race: a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile", Brace discusses the controversy concerning the race of the Ancient Egyptians. Brace argues that the "Egyptians have been in place since back in the Pleistocene and have been largely unaffected by either invasions or migrations".

In a 2006 publication "The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form", Brace argues that Natufian peoples, who are thought to be the source of the European Neolithic, had Sub-Saharan African admixture
African admixture in Europe
African admixture in Europe refers to the Eurasian presence of Human genetic polymorphisms, which are considered to be evidence for movements of people from Africa to Eurasia in both the prehistoric and historic past.-Geographical influences:...

.

Works

  • Man's Evolution: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology (1965.)
  • The Stages Of Human Evolution: Human And Cultural Origins (1967)
  • Atlas of Fossil Man. C. Loring Brace, Harry Nelson, and Noel Korn (1971)
  • Race and Intelligence. Edited by C. Loring Brace, George R. Gamble, and James T. Bond. Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1971.
  • Man In Evolutionary Perspective. Compiled by C. Loring Brace and James Metress (1973)
  • Human Evolution: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology. C. L. Brace and Ashley Montagu (1977)
  • Atlas of Human Evolution (1979)
  • The Stages Of Human Evolution: Human And Cultural Origins (1979)
  • Evolution in an anthropological view (2000)
  • Race is a four letter word (2005)

Past PhD Students (Alphabetical order)

  • Patricia S. Bridges (1985)
  • Dean Falk
    Dean Falk
    Dean Falk is an American academic anthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates...

     (1976)
  • Sonia E. Guillen (1992)
  • Margaret E. Hamilton (1975)
  • Robert J. Hinton (1979)
  • Kevin D. Hunt (1989)
  • Carol J. Lauer (1976)
  • Paul E. Mahler (1973)
  • Stephen Molnar (1968)
  • A. Russell Nelson (1998)
  • Conrad B. Quintyn (1999)
  • Karen R. Rosenberg (1986)
  • Alan S. Ryan (1980)
  • Margaret J. Schoeninger (1980)
  • Noriko Seguchi (2000)
  • B. Holly Smith (1983)
  • Frank Spencer (1979)
  • Kenneth M. Weiss (1972)
  • Richard G. Wilkinson (1970)
  • Lucia Allen Yaroch (1994)

External links

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