Sally McBrearty

Sally McBrearty was an American paleoanthropologist and Paleolithic archaeologist. She was a professor and head of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.[1]

Sally McBrearty
Education
Known for
SpouseAndrew Hill
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Websitewww.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/

Education and career

McBrearty studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, completing her PhD at Illinois in 1986. She joined the University of Connecticut in 1994, was appointed a professor in 2002, and head of the department of anthropology in 2008. Previously, she held positions at Brandeis University, Yale University, and the College of William & Mary.[1][2]

She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.[1][3]

Research

Middle Stone Age in Africa

McBrearty's work on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa helped to revolution understandings of modern human behavior.[4] With colleague Alison S. Brooks, McBrearty published "The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior," one of the most-cited papers in the history of Paleolithic archaeology.[5] This paper argued that behavioral modernity arose in Africa over a long period of time, and that it is visible very early in the MSA archaeological record. This view challenged European-centric models for human evolution that argued for a sudden appearance of behavioral modernity in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic.

Chimpanzee evolution

McBrearty and her colleague Nina Jablonski are credited with the discovery of the first known chimpanzee fossils.[6][7][8] McBrearty collected the first fossil, a molar tooth, during her surveys at Kapthurin in the East African Rift Valley in 2004, and immediately suspected that it belonged to an ape. Joblonski, a specialist in monkey fossils, then examined the tooth and positively identified it as chimpanzee. She also found a second example, an incisor, in the same collection. The following year McBrearty's team returned to Kapthurin and discovered a further two fossil chimpanzee teeth.[9] They believe that all four teeth belonged to the same individual.[6]

McBrearty and Jablonski announced the discovery in a paper in Nature in 2005.[10] As well as being the first known chimpanzee fossils, the teeth were the first fossils of modern, non-human apes found in Africa. Dating to around 500,000 years ago, they were also discovered outside the range of modern chimpanzees, overturning a previous idea that the Rift Valley was a barrier to the species. McBrearty has proposed that fossils of chimpanzees are scarce because their preferred habitat—the wet jungles of Central and West Africa—experience poor conditions for preservation. Researchers did not expect to find the ancestors of chimpanzees in the drier savannahs of the Rift Valley, typically seen as the ecological niche of archaic humans, but McBrearty believes that there are more examples there because of the better preservation.[7][9]

Personal life

McBrearty lives in Glastonbury, Connecticut. She was married to Andrew Hill, also a paleoanthropologist, until his death in 2015.[11][12]

References
  1. "Sally McBrearty". Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA). UC San Diego / Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  2. "Sally McBrearty – Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). University of Connecticut. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  3. "AAAS Annual Report – 2007". American Association for the Advancement of Science. 31 December 2007. p. 22. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  4. Wilford, John Noble (26 February 2002). "When Humans Became Human". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
  5. Tomlinson, Gary (9 May 2018). Culture and the Course of Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226548661.
  6. "First chimpanzee fossils found". BBC News. 31 August 2005. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  7. Hopkin, Michael (29 August 2005). "First chimp fossil unearthed". Nature News. doi:10.1038/news050829-10. ISSN 1744-7933.
  8. Orwant, Robert (31 August 2005). "First convincing chimp fossil discovered". New Scientist. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  9. "Making the paper: Sally McBrearty and Nina Jablonski". Nature. 437 (7055): xiii. 1 September 2005. doi:10.1038/437xiiia. ISSN 0028-0836. S2CID 29485961.
  10. McBrearty, Sally; Jablonski, Nina G. (2005). "First fossil chimpanzee". Nature. 437 (7055): 105–108. Bibcode:2005Natur.437..105M. doi:10.1038/nature04008. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 16136135. S2CID 4423286.
  11. Beech, Mark Jonathan (21 September 2015). "A renowned and admired palaeoanthropologist who devoted much time to Abu Dhabi's wilderness". The National. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  12. Bishop, Laura; Fisher, Rebecca; Plummer, Tom; Rossie, James; Scott, Monique (25 September 2015). "Remembering Dr. Andrew Hill". Department of Anthropology News. Yale University. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
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