Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Alan's Work
Alan Walker is a paleontologist working on the earliest stages of human evolution in the Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene epochs.
He endeavors to extract ancient behaviors from fossil records, concentrating mainly on records from East Africa. His discoveries include hundreds of fossils of the Miocene ape, Proconsul, a largely complete skeleton of a Homo erectus youth, and the skull of an early, robust Australopithecus. He has brought new techniques such as stereoscopic measuring and electron microscopy to bear on the analysis of fossil finds. Walker was also largely responsible for the formation of the functional morphology-paleontology group at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the co-author of The Ape in the Tree: The Natural and Intellectual History of Proconsul (2005) and co-editor of The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton (1993).
Biography
Walker is the Evan Pugh Professor of Biological Anthropology and Biology at Pennsylvania State University and a research associate at the National Museum of Kenya. His numerous articles have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Human Evolution and Nature.
Walker received a B.A. (1962) from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. (1967) from the University of London.
Recent News
Alan Walker is Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Biology at Pennsylvania State University. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
Updated July 2015
Published on August 1, 1988
