Population and environment-our nature and our fate: an evolutionary perspective

Abstract

Abstract Professor Geoffrey Ainsworth Harrison held a personal Chair in Biological Anthropology at Oxford University from 1976 until his retirement in 1994 and has been a Fellow of Linacre College since 1965. He has the unusual distinction of holding first degrees from both Cambridge (Trinity College) in natural sciences and archaeology and anthropology, and Oxford (Christ Church) in zoology. He also holds a B.Sc. from the University of London, and was awarded his Doctorate at Oxford in 1954. In that year Geoffrey Harrison was appointed to a lectureship in human anatomy at the University of Liverpool, where he stayed until 1963 when he returned to Oxford as Reader in Physical Anthropology and head of the anthropology laboratory. His fieldwork has taken him to south-west Africa, Ethiopia, Brazil, New Guinea, and Australia. His publications include The structure of human populations (1972) and Population structure and human variation (1977). The creation of a statutory Professorship of Biological Anthropology in the University of Oxford from 1994 testifies to the recognition that Geoffrey Harrison has won for his subject as a key discipline among the human sciences.