WILLIAM W. HOWELLS, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, was most noted for his work showing that modern humans are all of a single species.
Although Howells made his most significant findings in the 1960s, when anthropology was racked by heated debates about racial issues, he continued to be active in the discipline and was a fixture at the Peabody Museum, Harvard, long into his retirement. Colleagues who visited him to discuss the reconstruction of the skull of the earliest hominid, Sahelanthropus, found him, at 95, still sharp, perceptive and fully abreast of the specialist literature.
In 1992, almost 20 years after his retirement, Howells described the special pleasures of his subject in a memoir published in the Annual Review of Anthropology: “The discipline of teaching obliges you to try to present important matters in a well-rounded, balanced fashion, even as you make your own views known. A nice ideal, but now I can lean back, read without having to revise lecture notes, and tell myself (in private) just what I think of things.”
William White Howells — always known to colleagues and friends as Bill — was born in New York in 1908. As an infant, he was taken by his mother to visit his grandfather, William Dean Howells, the distinguished man of letters, who at the time was entertaining his close friend Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). On being asked by Bill’s mother if he would like to see the baby, Clemens replied, “Why should I?” Such a lack of enthusiasm — which accounted for Mrs Howells’s lifelong distaste for Clemens — would be unimaginable for her son who grew up to be the kindest, gentlest, most generous and least malicious of men.
Bill Howells was educated at St Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and Harvard, graduating in 1930. He then studied anthropology under Earnest Hooten and took his PhD in 1934. He worked at the American Museum of Natural History until being offered a teaching post at the University of Wisconsin in 1939. In 1943 he was commissioned into the Navy and served in Naval Intelligence until the end of the war, when he returned to Wisconsin, where he was appointed Professor in 1948. In 1954 he succeeded Hooten as professor of anthropology at Harvard where he remained until his retirement in 1974.
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Howells was trained during the golden years of “four field” anthropology, and he regretted the growing gulf between biological and cultural anthropology — “a depressing fact,” as he put it. His PhD dissertation on the contribution of skull measurement in understanding the population history of Melanesia began a lifelong commitment to an inclusive physical anthropology and human biology, to the Pacific, to craniometry and statistical analysis, and to the evolution of our genus, Homo.
His first book, a youthfully masterful overview of human evolution, was Mankind So Far (1944). It was followed by a study of “primitive” religions, The Heathens (1948).
Like Hooten, his mentor, Howells had strong interests in encouraging an integrative human biology. In the early 1960s he helped to organise what became the famous Harvard Solomon Islands Project. This involved a strongly interdisciplinary approach to the interactions of culture, natural selection and disease; linking such variables as habitat, nutrition, acculturation and health (reported in The Solomon Islands Project, edited in 1987 by Jonathan Friedlaender).
For example, the project documented the effects of an increasingly Western diet on previously isolated populations. In 1973 Howells published a typically lucid book for the general audience, The Pacific Islanders, synthesising a truly four-field approach to that vast region.
Howells is probably best known for his work on human skull variation and the analytical use of multivariate statistical techniques. While at Wisconsin he had become an increasingly sophisticated user of these statistical approaches to analysing variation within and differences between samples, and by the 1960s computation had become relatively easy.
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With his wife, Muriel, he embarked on an ambitious study of global cranial variation, collecting well over 100,000 measurements on more than 1,500 individuals representing 17 living populations. These data are still being widely and frequently used.
He wrote Harvard Peabody Museum monographs (“Papers”) in 1973, 1989 and 1995 (when he was 86), examining patterns of variation within and between living populations, inferring relationships among them and between the extant samples and various fossils, including non-moderns such as the Neanderthals.
Among other conclusions, he showed that living humans are quite homogeneous beneath the skin, that non-sapiens hominids are quite distinct, and (perhaps surprisingly) that even relatively recent and clearly modern individuals, living as recently as 12,000 years ago, fell outside a statistical clustering of all living crania.
A brief but influential textbook, Evolution of the Genus Homo (1973), summarised superbly and even-handedly the then state of play on various aspects of human evolution, and particularly the continuingly thorny topic of modern human origins (this was an extraordinarily productive year in which Howells also published the first of his cranial monographs as well as The Pacific Islanders). He wrote about Homo evolution all through his career, his syntheses always judicious and calmly objective.
His wonderful qualities as a teacher and colleague were recognised in his festschrift (1976) with its splendidly eclectic range of contributors. In addition to being a brilliant lecturer, a revered graduate teacher and a valued colleague, Howells seemed to have inherited his paternal grandfather’s abilities as a writer of superb prose. Of his popular books, two in particular are very important: Mankind in the Making (1959) — because it probably influenced more embryonic paleoanthropologists and primatologists half a century ago than any other book — and Getting Here — brilliantly and successfully synthetic, it was published in 1993 when Howells was 84 (and he updated it four years later).
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Howells’s wife, Muriel Gurdon Seabury, predeceased him in 2002 after 73 years of marriage, and he is survived by their daughter and son.
Professor William W. Howells, anthropologist, was born on November 27, 1908. He died on December 20, 2005, aged 97.