Alan Cyril Walker (23 August 1938 – 20 November 2017) was the

Evan Pugh Professor Evan Pugh (February 29, 1828 – April 29, 1864) was the first president of the Pennsylvania State University, serving from 1859 until his death in 1864. An agricultural chemist, he was responsible for securing Penn State's designation in 1863 as ...

Biological Anthropology Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a scientific discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an e ...

and Biology at the

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State becam ...

and a research scientist for the National Museum of Kenya.

Life

He received his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1962, and his PhD from the University of London in 1967. In 2000 he received an honorary D.Sc. from the University of Chicago. Walker was a paleoanthropologist who worked on primate and human evolution. Walker was a member of the team led by

Richard Leakey Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (19 December 1944 – 2 January 2022) was a Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician. Leakey held a number of official positions in Kenya, mostly in institutions of archaeology and wildlife conse ...

responsible for the 1984 discovery of the skeleton of the so-called

Turkana Boy Turkana Boy, also called Nariokotome Boy, is the name given to fossil KNM-WT 15000, a nearly complete skeleton of a ''Homo ergaster'' youth who lived 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago. This specimen is the most complete early hominin skeleton ever ...

, and in 1985 Walker himself discovered the

Black Skull KNM-WT 17000 (also known as "The Black Skull") is a fossilized adult skull of the species ''Paranthropus aethiopicus''. It was discovered in West Turkana, Kenya by Alan Walker in 1985. Estimated to be 2.5 million years old, it is an adult with ...

near

Lake Turkana Lake Turkana (), formerly known as Lake Rudolf, is a lake in the Kenyan Rift Valley, in northern Kenya, with its far northern end crossing into Ethiopia. It is the world's largest permanent desert lake and the world's largest alkaline lake. B ...

in Kenya.

Awards

Walker was awarded a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

"genius grant" in 1988. In 1997 he received the Rhône-Poulenc Award from the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

for ''The Wisdom of the Bones''. During the award ceremony,

Terry Pratchett Sir Terence David John Pratchett (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015) was an English humourist, satirist, and author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his '' Discworld'' series of 41 novels. Pratchett's first no ...

, chairman of the judges, said "We were fascinated by the way the forensic net was spread out, bringing so many sciences to bear on the mystery of this million-year-old teenager." The following year he received the International Fondation Fyssen Prize in Paris. He became a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

in 1996, and was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemati ...

in 1999. In 2003 he was named a member of the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the N ...

. In 2017 he received the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award from the

American Association of Physical Anthropologists The American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) is an international professional society of biological anthropologists, based in the United States. The organization publishes the ''American Journal of Physical Anthropology'', a pe ...

Bibliography

* 1996 (with his wife Pat Shipman). ''The Wisdom of Bones''. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. * 1993 (with

) eds. ''The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton''. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. * 1997 (with

Meave Leakey Meave G. Leakey (born Meave Epps; 28 July 1942) is a British palaeoanthropologist. She works at Stony Brook University and is co-ordinator of Plio-Pleistocene research at the Turkana Basin Institute. She studies early hominid evolution and h ...

). ''Early Hominid Fossils from Africa''.

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...

276, 6, 74–7

* 2005. ''The Ape in the Tree: An Intellectual and Natural History of Proconsul''. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass.

References

External links

Alan Walker's faculty page at Penn StateTen scholars to receive honorary degrees
{{DEFAULTSORT:Walker, Alan 1938 births 2017 deaths People from Leicester Alumni of the University of Cambridge Alumni of the University of London British paleoanthropologists 20th-century British biologists 21st-century British biologists Human evolution theorists MacArthur Fellows Pennsylvania State University faculty Anthropology educators Science teachers Fellows of the Royal Society Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences

Life

Awards

Bibliography

See also

References

External links