Tim D. White (born August 24, 1950) is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. He is best known for leading the team which discovered

Ardi ARDI is the Access to Research for Development and Innovation program, a partnership between the World Intellectual Property Organization and major scientific and technical publishers. ARDI provides access to nearly 10,000 online journals, books and ...

, the type specimen of ''Ardipithecus ramidus'', a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor. Prior to that discovery, his early career was notable for his work on

Lucy Lucy is an English feminine given name derived from the Latin masculine given name Lucius with the meaning ''as of light'' (''born at dawn or daylight'', maybe also ''shiny'', or ''of light complexion''). Alternative spellings are Luci, Luce, Lu ...

as ''Australopithecus afarensis'' with discoverer

Donald Johanson Donald Carl Johanson (born June 28, 1943) is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering, with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb, the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hada ...

Career

Timothy Douglas White was born on August 24, 1950, in Los Angeles County, California and raised in Lake Arrowhead in neighboring

San Bernardino County San Bernardino County (), officially the County of San Bernardino, is a county located in the southern portion of the U.S. state of California, and is located within the Inland Empire area. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, the population was 2,181, ...

. He majored in biology and anthropology at the

University of California, Riverside The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on in a suburban distr ...

. He received his Ph.D. in physical anthropology from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

. White took a position in the Department of Anthropology at the

in 1977, later moving to the university's Department of Integrative Biology. At present, White teaches courses on human paleontology and human osteology. Generally, each spring semester he teaches one of the two the alternation. He is director of the Human Evolution Research Center and co-director, with

Berhane Asfaw Berhane Asfaw (Amharic: በርሃነ አስፋው) (born August 22, 1954 in Gondar, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian paleontologist of Rift Valley Research Service, who co-discovered human skeletal remains at Herto Bouri, Ethiopia later classified as ...

, Yonas Beyene, and Giday WoldeGabriel, of the Middle Awash Research Project. White has taught and mentored many paleoanthropologists who have subsequently gone on to prominence in the field, including

, William Henry Gilbert,

Yohannes Haile-Selassie Yohannes Haile-Selassie Ambaye (born 23 February 1961) is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist. An authority on pre-''Homo sapiens'' hominids, he particularly focuses his attention on the East African Rift and Middle Awash valleys.Mangels, John (200 ...

, and

Gen Suwa Gen Suwa (born 1954) is a Japanese paleoanthropologist. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of the evolution of early hominids, including the discovery of a tooth from a hominid that was more than one million years older than the ...

. Since 2013, White has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.

Collaborations

In 1974, White worked with

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 ...

's team at Koobi Fora, Kenya. Leakey was so impressed with White's work that he recommended him to his mother,

Mary Leakey Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA (née Nicol, 6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996) was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised ''Proconsul'' skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also disc ...

, to help her with hominid fossils she had found at Laetoli, Tanzania. White took a job at the

in 1977 and collaborated with

J. Desmond Clark John Desmond Clark (10 April 1916 – 14 February 2002) was a British archaeologist noted particularly for his work on prehistoric Africa. Early life Clark was born in London, but his childhood was spent in a hamlet in the Chiltern Hills of B ...

and F. Clark Howell. In 1994, White discovered 4.4 million-year-old ''

Ardipithecus ramidus ''Ardipithecus ramidus'' is a species of australopithecine from the Afar region of Early Pliocene Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago (mya). ''A. ramidus'', unlike modern hominids, has adaptations for both walking on two legs ( bipedality) and life i ...

'', a likely human ancestor from an era which was previously empty of fossil evidence. Near the Awash River in Ethiopia, he found an almost complete fossilized female skeleton, named "

". He took nearly 15 years to prepare publication of the description. In 1996, White, along with paleontologist

discovered fossils of a 2.5 million-year-old species BOU-VP-12/130 ''

Australopithecus garhi ''Australopithecus garhi'' is a species of australopithecine from the Bouri Formation in the Afar Region of Ethiopia 2.6–2.5 million years ago (mya) during the Early Pleistocene. The first remains were described in 1999 based on several skele ...

'', which is thought to predate ''

H. habilis ''Homo habilis'' ("handy man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Early Pleistocene of East and South Africa about 2.31 million years ago to 1.65 million years ago (mya). Upon species description in 1964, ''H. habilis'' was highly c ...

'' tool use and manufacturing by 100,000 to 600,000 years.

Honors

*Fellow of the

California Academy of Sciences The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 ...

*Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceAAAS - Fellows
"WHITE, TIM D, UNIV OF CAL BERKELEY, BERKELEY, USA" *David S. Ingalls Jr. Award from the

Cleveland Museum of Natural History The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum located approximately five miles (8 km) east of downtown Cleveland, Ohio in University Circle, a 550-acre (220 ha) concentration of educational, cultural and medical instit ...

*Member of the National Academy of Sciences * Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (1995) *Distinguished Alumnus of the Year (2000) at the University of California, Riverside

Selected publications

* * * * * * * * *

References

External links