A Celebration of Clifford Jolly’s Contribution to Biological Anthropology

Abstract

Biological anthropology is a unique scientific field in which, possibly more than in other sciences, progress depends on the effective integration and synthesis of data and evidence from a wide variety of disciplines. Combining the complexity and depth of modern biology with a desire to understand the unique historical event that is the origin of our own species, significant advances in biological anthropology often develop from the creative application of new methods developed in one scientific discipline to questions posed by researchers with entirely different interests. In addition, some of the most important advances during the history of human evolutionary studies have come from individual investigators who reframed traditional questions in light of new comparative evidence drawn from the living primates. Clifford Jolly‘s long and remarkably successful career illustrates the value and impact of integrating evidence and concepts from disparate fields in the service of the broad goals of biological anthropology. He has made substantive and lasting contributions to the interpretation of the human fossil record, to both knowledge of and methods used in the study of natural populations of living primates, to laboratory procedures for investigating those primates, and certainly to the conceptual framework that biological anthropologists employ to understand evolutionary diversity within and among primate species. In order to celebrate the many significant contributions Cliff has made and continues to make to our broad field of study, and to highlight the current exciting state of biological anthropology in general, we organized a conference designed to bring together active researchers from a variety of subfields in which he has worked. This section of Current Anthropology presents a series of five papers first presented at that conference. The conference, titled “Evolutionary Anthropology at the Interface,” was a two-day event held in New York in October 2007