Glynn Llywelyn Isaac was born on 19 November 1937 in Cape Town, South Africa. His father was William Edwyn Isaac, a botanist who became Professor of Botany at the University of Cape Town, and his mother was Frances Margaret Leighton, the flowering-plant expert at Cape Town’s Bolus Herbarium. Isaac grew up in the western Cape with his twin brother Rhys. He became interested in archaeology as a teenager after reading a book by the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, A Brief History of Ancient Times (1927), which prompted him to explore the prehistoric archaeology of the western Cape. After graduating from school, he worked on Bronze Age and late Mesolithic excavations in England and completed a diploma course in archeological techniques at The University of London. He received his B.Sc. in Geology (for which he received the Class Medal), in 1956. He then received his B.Sc. in Zoology (for which he received the Class Medal in 1957) and in Archaeology/Ethnology at the University of Cape Town in 1958. Isaac studied with anthropologist Monica Wilson, who taught him the ethnography of southern African peoples, and archaeologist John Goodwin, who taught him about the Stone Age in South Africa. During this period, he participated in excavations at the Early Stone Age site of Cape Hangklip, located on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. Also, in 1956, he hitchhiked 1,000 miles from Cape Town to Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to study the collections at the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum. When John Goodwin died in early 1959, Isaac taught the archaeology course at the University of Cape Town that year.

Isaac entered Cambridge University in October 1959 as a member of Peterhouse. He received an Elsie Ballot Scholarship, which is awarded to South African students, to study Paleolithic Archaeology (the Elsie Ballot Scholarship is the equivalent of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University). Isaac read Part II of the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos and received his B.A. in archaeology in the summer of 1961, studying under Grahame Clark and Charles McBurney. He joined McBurney’s excavations at the Lower Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey, in 1960. During the summer of 1960, Isaac also worked with American archaeologist Hallam Movius Jr. on the excavation of the Abri Pataud rockshelter in France. Isaac also worked with Eric Higgs in Libya for a field season in 1961. In 1960 Isaac met his future wife, Barbara Miller, at a Derbyshire Archaeological Society dig at Creswell Crags led by Charles McBurney. Miller had a B.A. in English from Cambridge University, and she was working as an education officer at the Sheffield City Museum at the time. During their life together, she collaborated with Isaac on his research projects.

Isaac’s studies took a dramatic turn when Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey invited Isaac to conduct research at Olorgesailie. This research became the subject of Isaac’s doctoral research. Leakey was the curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi and was already renowned for his discoveries at Olduvai Gorge and other sites. Leakey first appointed Isaac to be Warden of Prehistoric Sites for what at that time was the Royal National Parks of Kenya. Isaac held this position from 1961 to 1962, and in this capacity, he had responsibility for Olorgesailie, Kariandusi, and Gamble’s Cave. He was promoted to Deputy Director of the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology (which Leakey had created at the Coryndon Museum in 1961), and Isaac held this position from 1963 to 1965. Olorgesailie is an Acheulean archaeological site located between two extinct volcanoes, Mt. Olorgesailie and Oldonyo Esakut, in the Great Rift Valley in southern Kenya. Louis and Mary Leakey conducted excavations there from 1942 to 1954, and the site was developed as an open-air Prehistoric Site with a residential warden. Following Louis’ invitation to work at Olorgesailie, Isaac conducted extensive excavations there from 1961 to 1965. He studied the stratigraphy and archaeology, which proved to be important because Olorgesailie contained a number of well-preserved living sites that are marked by concentrations of bone fragments from extinct animals along with hand axes and other stone tools deposited along the shoreline of a now-extinct lake. Isaac systematically compared the structure and contents of these living sites, which allowed him to identify the behavior patterns of the hominids that inhabited the site and to test ideas about the rate and direction of behavioral change in early hominid communities.

Isaac returned to Cambridge in 1965 after completing his research at Olorgesailie in order to write his dissertation. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1969 with a dissertation titled The Acheulean Site Complex at Olorgesailie, Kenya: A Contribution to the Interpretation of Middle Pleistocene Culture in East Africa (1968). But he continued to study and write about the Olorgesailie material. In 1977 Isaac published a monograph titled Olorgesailie: Archaeological Studies of a Middle Pleistocene Lake Basin in Kenya, which presented a comprehensive summary of his research there. In this book, he formulated research questions and developed methodological approaches that ranged widely, including site-formation processes, artifact function and design, and the reconstruction of early hominid hunting abilities and social organization. He conducted a quantitative analysis of the morphology of the Acheulean artifacts from Olorgesailie, and this analysis showed that there was little, if any, short- or long-term change in Acheulean tools over a period of many thousands of years. In an early example of taphonomic research, Isaac experimented with replicas of bones and stone tools in order to evaluate the sedimentary processes that might have led to the unusual concentrations of artifacts and animal bones at Olorgesailie, and he developed innovative multivariate approaches to analyze the attributes of hand axes and cleavers.

Before Isaac left Kenya to return to Cambridge, he had conducted research at several other sites besides Olorgesailie. Louis Leakey, Isaac, and Barbara Whitehead Anthony excavated the open-air site of Prospect Farm, located in the Nakuru-Naivasha basin, from November 1963 to July 1964. They unearthed a sequence of Middle Stone Age, Late Stone Age, and Neolithic deposits. Isaac and Ronald Clarke then excavated Gamble’s Cave II, also located in the Nakuru-Naivasha basin, in 1964. Additionally, Louis Leakey asked Isaac in late 1963 to join Richard Leakey’s team on the western shores of Lake Natron, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where Richard was prospecting for fossils. During the field survey in 1964, one of the Kenyan members of the team, Kamoya Kimeu, found a 1.5 million year old australopithecine mandible at a site called Peninj, just west of Lake Natron (Leakey and Leakey 1964). The team excavated the area where the jaw was discovered, and Isaac investigated the geology of the site and conducted excavations that unearthed some of the oldest known Acheulean hand axes in Africa, similar to those found at Olduvai Gorge (Isaac 1965; 1967). Finally, Isaac and Charles Nelson excavated the Prolonged Drift site, northwest of Lake Nakuru, from 1969 to 1970 where they found Neolithic artifacts.

In the course of all this work, Isaac had moved to the United States in 1966 to join the faculty of the Department of Anthropology, at the University of California, Berkeley. There his colleagues included Sherwood Washburn, J. Desmond Clark, Phyllis Dolhinow, Theodore McCown, Elizabeth Colson, Richard Hay, and in 1970 F. Clark Howell also joined the faculty. At Berkeley, Isaac was part of the Old World Prehistory Program, and in 1969 he established the University of California Archaeological Research Group in Kenya. From July 1969 to March 1970, the group studied the geological stratigraphy, paleoenviromental history, and prehistory of the Naivasha-Nakuru Lake Basins and spent a short time at Lake Natron. This was at a time when the International Omo Research Expedition was working in Ethiopia, and Richard Leakey had just initiated the East Rudolf excavations. The National Museums of Kenya organized an expedition led by Richard Leakey in 1968 to study the geology and paleontology of the east side of Lake Rudolf (renamed Lake Turkana in 1975), in northern Kenya. In 1969 a base camp was established at Koobi Fora, a sandy beach on the shore of the lake, which became the center of operations for this research. Richard Leakey invited Isaac to conduct archaeological research at East Rudolf in 1969 and subsequently asked him to become co-leader of The East Rudolf Research Project when it was established in 1970 (the project was renamed the Koobi Fora Research Project in 1975).

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Isaac and a group of his Berkeley graduate students excavated a number of sites along the lake where they unearthed Oldowan and Acheulean tools. These sites ranged in age from 1.9 to 1.4 million years old. Isaac devoted considerable attention to the Oldowan tools that Kay Behrensmeyer, a graduate student from Harvard University, discovered among Pleistocene animal fossils. Behrensmeyer joined the East Rudolf Research Project in 1969 and was tasked with studying the geology of the area and mapping its stratigraphy. One particular layer of volcanic tuff contained Oldowan artifacts similar to those that Louis and Mary Leakey had discovered at Olduvai Gorge. This layer was named the Kay Behrensmeyer Site tuff (KBS tuff) and it could be dated using the recently developed potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating method, which yielded a date of 2.6 million years for the tuff layer. This very early date proved to be quite controversial because it was inconsistent with dates from the Shungura and Usno Formations in the Omo River basin in Ethiopia. French paleontologist Camille Arambourg and American paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell had begun research in the Omo basin in 1967 and a major component of their research was to establish a detailed record of the change in mammal fossils in the long sequence of geological deposits at the site. These deposits consisted of river sediments and volcanic layers that could be dated using the potassium-argon dating method. Basil Cooke’s study of fossil pigs from the Omo basin proved particularly important because the many pig species could be dated, and since these species frequently replaced one another, pig fossils could be used as a chronological marker for other deposits that could not be dated using other methods.

The geological and paleontological work in the Omo basin had significant implications for what came to be called the KBS tuff controversy. Potassium-argon dating of the KBS tuff had returned a date of 2.6 million years, but comparisons of the animal fossils found in this deposit with those from the Omo basin suggested a younger date of about 1.9 million years. For several years in the early 1970s, paleoanthropologists were divided by disagreement over the dating of the KBS tuff. In September 1973, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research sponsored a symposium held in Nairobi, Kenya, on the “Stratigraphy, Paleoecology, and Evolution in the Lake Rudolf Basin.” The symposium, organized by F. Clark Howell, Yves Coppens, Glynn Isaac, and Richard Leakey brought together scientists from the research groups working at Lake Rudolf and the Omo River basin in the hope of resolving the KBS tuff controversy. The papers focused on the geology, paleontology, ecology, and archaeology of the deposits containing hominid remains at these sites. Isaac presented a paper on the “Plio-Pleistocene Artifact Assemblages from East Rudolf, Kenya” (Isaac 1976a). The symposium avoided the debates, rampant at the time, over hominid taxonomy and phylogeny. A significant part of the symposium was devoted to correlating the stratigraphy, animal fossils, and radiometric dates of the Omo basin deposits with those from Lake Rudolf. The symposium helped to finally resolve the KBS tuff controversy and the papers were published in Earliest Man and Environments in the Lake Rudolf Basin: Stratigraphy, Paleoecology, and Evolution (1976). In the end further research eventually resolved the dispute. During the KBS tuff controversy, Isaac was a strong advocate for collegial dialogue, and he expressed the importance of undertaking new research to resolve the discrepant dates.

Isaac was fundamentally interested in the evolution of human behavior and he used archaeology to investigate a range of questions related to this. He developed original and significant ideas about the archaeological record and the evolution of human society over the course of his career. He wrote a paper (Isaac 1971) titled “Whither Archaeology?” as a response to an article published by English archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes (Hawkes 1968) that attacked the New Archaeology. In his paper, Isaac defended archaeology as a humanistic science. Isaac was interested in a wide range of questions. These included determining when stone tools began to be made, determining the function of these tools, and how clusters of artifacts and bones were formed. He worked to integrate Paleolithic archeology, human paleontology, cultural anthropology, ecology, primatology, ethology, nutritional studies, geology, and paleogeography into an integrated whole. He believed strongly in hypothesis testing and taphonomic studies. He encouraged the pursuit of actualistic studies such as ethnoarchaeology, primatology, experimental archaeology, and he was a pioneer of landscape archaeology, which he referred to as “the scatter between the patches.” This notion of “the scatter between the patches” refers to his observation that stone tools are found not just in the context of established home base, butchery, and quarry sites, but also as a thin, diffuse scatter between these sites. He suggested that this scatter represented geographically unfocused, recurrent activities possibly associated with foraging. The preliminary analysis of widely scattered surface finds dating from the Oldowan/Acheulean transition in East Turkana suggested that there might be significant differences in the tool kits used at home bases and those used in these more diffuse foraging activities.

During the course of his research at Olorgesailie and at Koobi Fora, Isaac developed a classification of sites based upon the proportion of stone artifacts relative to animal bones. The major categories in this system were 1) Camp or occupation sites containing a high density of stone and bone objects; 2) Quarry or workshop sites with a high density of stone artifacts but a low density of bones; 3) Kill or butchery sites with a high density of bones but a low density of stone artifacts; 4) Transitory camps with a low density of both stone artifacts and bones (Isaac 1971b). He also introduced new ideas relating to the Oldowan industry. Louis Leakey created the term “Oldowan” in 1936 to refer to the oldest stone tools found at Olduvai Gorge. Mary Leakey then distinguished older “Oldowan” tools from later “Developed Oldowan” tools. However, Isaac (1976a) combined these two types into what he called the Oldowan Industrial Complex.

From the archaeological evidence recovered from sites such as KBS (FxJj1) and HAS (FxJj3) at Lake Turkana, Isaac formulated his food sharing/home base hypothesis in the mid-1970s. This idea linked Lower Paleolithic archaeology with social anthropological theory and drew upon the work of such people as physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn, primatologist Jane Lancaster, and anthropologist Richard Lee (who studied the !Kung San in the Kalahari desert). This was at a time when Sherwood Washburn was promoting the Man the Hunter hypothesis, which argued that hunting had played an important role in human evolution. In fact, Isaac presented a paper at the “Man the Hunter” symposium organized by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore in 1968. This paper (Isaac 1968) introduced some ideas about home bases where hunters brought game back to share with their mates and offspring. Isaac used the archaeological data from Lake Turkana to infer that hominids transported food and artifacts to a central location. He also concluded there was a relatively high level of meat consumption among these hominids. To explain these inferences, he hypothesized the existence of home bases, food sharing, and division of labor as the adaptive complex of early hominids. He argued that these behaviors provided the selective pressures for the development of language and other human characteristics. From this model, he argued that the earliest (Oldowan) archeological sites in Africa should be interpreted as the material remains of newly evolved types of hominid behavior that included the use of home bases, flaked-stone technologies, food sharing, significant meat-eating resulting from hunting and/or scavenging, and a pronounced sexual division of labor.

Isaac’s food sharing/home base model eventually replaced the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis as a framework for interpreting human behavioral and social origins. The landmark paper that presented this model (Isaac 1978) appeared in the same year that Jane Lancaster (1978) also published a paper that stressed the importance of sharing in human evolution. The food sharing/home base hypothesis argued that a modern human “habitually carries tools, food and other possessions either with his arms or in containers” and communicates with other humans by a spoken language. This model also argued that the acquisition and sharing of food is “a corporate responsibility,” that modern human hunter-gathers conduct their foraging operations in the vicinity of communal gathering places or “home bases,” and that humans seek to acquire high-protein foodstuffs by hunting or fishing. Isaac noted that none of these behaviors are common in apes. He argued that tool-use was important both for gathering food and for processing it for consumption. After examining the archaeological evidence from Koobi Fora, he argued that hominids had developed these behaviors at some point between 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago and that they were part of “a novel adaptive strategy” which led to modern Homo sapiens.

Isaac’s work at Koobi Fora resulted in important investigations of the tool-making abilities, subsistence patterns, ranging behavior, and social behavior of the hominids that made Oldowan tools. He studied the ways stone tools were used, how hominid social groups were organized, their diet, whether they slept in trees or on the ground, and the development of their ability to speak. He conducted experiments on archaeological site formation that would enable researchers to distinguish hominid action from animal action or geological processes. His research led to an improved ability to identify the various agencies responsible for taphonomic accumulations and dispersals at sites, as well as the establishment of many of the criteria that are the hallmarks of hominid activity during the Plio-Pleistocene period. Isaac believed that in order to reconstruct hominid behavior at hominid sites one needed to analyze the distribution of hominid fossils, artifacts, and hominid modified animal bones within the landscape. He was interested in the movement of early hominids and where they preferred to live. As part of this research, he constructed maps and diagrams showing the movement of hominids. Several students wrote doctoral theses based upon research at Koobi Fora, with topics including artifact replication, site deposition, taphonomy, and food acquisition.

However, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of Isaac’s ideas about early hominid behavior, especially the “food sharing/home base” model, received criticism. One of the most influential critics was the American archaeologist Lewis Binford. In his book Bones, Ancient Men and Modern Myths (1981), Binford complained that Isaac’s hypothesis relied upon too many assumptions concerning the association between the stone tools and the animal fossils found at archaeological sites. These criticisms subsequently led Isaac to downplay the “humanness” of early Paleolithic hominids and to establish a wide-ranging research program to investigate site formation that involved actualistic and experimental studies. He replaced the idea of home bases with the term “central place foraging” areas, which did not require food sharing or division of labor. Significantly, he continued to emphasize the value of considering multiple alternative hypotheses when interpreting archeological data.

During the course of his career, Isaac made important contributions to the theory of artifact typology. He was strict about the proper classification of his finds and the ordering of data generally. This is seen in his coordination work for the Commission on Nomenclature for the Pan-African Congress of Prehistory and Quaternary Studies. Isaac enthusiastically accepted new methodological tools and theoretical approaches. These included the quantitative analysis of data, the recently developed radiometric techniques for dating sites, stable isotope analysis, geoarchaeological and site formation studies, and optimal foraging theory. He was critical of “simple additive models” that proposed sequences for the appearance of modern human characteristics that included moving to the savanna, bipedalism, tool use, hunting, and brain enlargement because some of the behaviors that such models sought to explain were already present in chimpanzees. He proposed instead an integrated model. “Integrated growth is a better analogue than chain reaction. Thus I would favor models involving concurrent development with mutual reinforcement of adaptive advantages by matching changes in all components, and from this stance I would argue that hunting, food sharing, division of labor, pair bonding, and operation from a home base or camp, form a functional complex, the components of which are more likely to have developed in concert than in succession. It is easy to see that tools, language, and social cooperation would fit into the functional complex as well, and very likely had equally long development histories within the overall system” (Isaac 1972b).

When Isaac began working at Koobi Fora, he was still at the University of California, Berkeley. He was invited to be a Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, at Cambridge University, during the 1975-76 academic year, and he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the Australian National University in the summer of 1976. He was later invited to be a visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University during the spring semester in 1981. Isaac accepted an offer to become a professor at Harvard as well as Curator of Paleolithic Archaeology at the Peabody Museum in 1983 and he remained at Harvard until his death. In the course of his career, Isaac was an active member of a number of scientific institutions and was involved in organizing several important conferences. Isaac and Desmond Clark organized a conference on “Les plus anciennes industries en Afrique” for the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences that was held on 13 September 1976 in Nice, France. Desmond Clark, Glynn Isaac, and Jean Combier organized a conference on “Las industrias más antiguas: pre-Acheulense y Acheulense” for the International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences that was held in Mexico City from 19-24 October 1981. He was a participant (along with Bernard Grant Campbell, Desmond Clark, Raymond Dart, Dian Fossey, David Hamburg, Richard Hay, F. Clark Howell, Mary Leakey, and Jane Goodall) at the Leakey Foundation Symposium titled “In Search of Man,” which was held on 2 December 1973 before an audience of a thousand people in San Francisco, California. He was a joint-organizer of the Gordon Conference on Diet held in California in 1984, which brought together archaeologists, anthropologists, chemists, nutritionists and health scientists.

Isaac was among a group of researchers present at a meeting held in Urbana, Illinois, in April 1971 that founded the Society of Africanist Archaeologists in America (now the Society of Africanist Archaeologists). Some of the others present at the founding were Desmond Clark, Richard Klein, Mary Leakey, Richard Hay, and Fred Wendorf. Isaac was a founding director of the Foundation for Research into the Origins of Man from 1976 to 1983 and chaired its Science and Grants Committee. Richard Leakey established the Foundation in 1973 in order to fund his research. Isaac was a member of the South African Archaeological Society, the American Anthropological Association, and the Prehistoric Society (UK). He was also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Life Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Isaac was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London shortly before his death. He served as a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Anthropology Panel (1981-82) and as a council member for Section H (Anthropology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1981-83). He also served on the editorial board of the journal Science from 1982 to 1983. Isaac received numerous awards and scholarships during his career, including the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1975-1976).

Throughout Isaac’s career, the political debate over apartheid engaged many South African scientists, and Isaac was an outspoken opponent of apartheid. In fact his parents left South Africa and moved to Kenya in 1961 in part because of the government’s apartheid policy. Isaac occasionally raised the issue with some of his South African colleagues, such as Phillip Tobias, over whether scientists should leave the country as a form of protest against apartheid.

Isaac became ill with a fever on a trip to Beijing for the National Academy of Sciences and was taken to the United States Naval Hospital at Yokosuka, near Tokyo. He was preparing to return to the United States for treatment when he collapsed and died at the American air base in Tokyo, Japan on 5 October 1985. After his death, Barbara Isaac edited a collection of eighteen of his most important scholarly papers in the book The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glynn Isaac (1989). She also co-edited his posthumous monograph Koobi Fora Research Project, Volume 5: Plio-Pleistocene Archaeology, published in 1997. Barbara Isaac donated the Glynn Isaac Papers to the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in 2001 and 2002.

Selected Bibliography

“The Stratigraphy of the Peninj Beds and the Provenance of the Natron Australopithecine Mandible.” Quaternaria 7 (1965): 101-130.

“The Stratigraphy of the Peninj Group-Early Middle Pleistocene Formations West of Lake Natron, Tanzania.” In W. W. Bishop and J. D. Clark (eds.). Background to Evolution in Africa. Pp. 229-257. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

“Traces of Pleistocene Hunters: An East African Example.” In I. DeVore and R. Lee (eds.), Man the Hunter. Pp. 253-261. Chicago: Aldine, 1968.

“Studies of Early Culture in East Africa.” World Archaeology 1 (1969): 1-28.

“Whither Archaeology?” Antiquity 45 (1971a): 123-129.

“The Diet of Early Man: Aspects of Archaeological Evidence from Lower and Middle Pleistocene Sites in East Africa.” World Archaeology 2 (1971b): 278-299.

“Chronology and Tempo of Cultural Change during the Pleistocene.” In W.W. Bishop and J. A. Miller (eds.). Calibration of Hominoid Evolution: Recent Advances in Isotopic and other Dating Methods as Applicable to the Origin of Man. Pp. 381-430. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972a.

“Early Phases of Human Behaviour: Models in Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology.” In D. L. Clarke (ed.). Models in Archaeology. Pp. 167-199. London: Methuen, 1972b.

“Identification of Cultural Entities in the Middle Pleistocene.” In H. J. Hugot (ed.), Actes de 6° Session, Congrès Panafricain de Préhistoire. Pp. 556–562. Chambéry: Les Imprimeries Réunies de Chambéry, 1972.

Glynn Isaac and Garniss Curtis, “Age of Early Acheulian Industries from the Peninj Group, Tanzania.” Nature 249 (1974): 624-627.

“Middle Pleistocene Stratigraphy, and Cultural Patterns in East Africa.” In K. W. Butzer and G. Isaac (eds.), After the Australopithecines: Stratigraphy, Ecology and Culture Change in the Middle Pleistocene. Pp. 495-542. The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1975.

“Plio-Pleistocene Artifact Assemblages from East Rudolf, Kenya.” In Y. Coppens, F .C. Howell, G. L. Isaac and R. Leakey (eds). Earliest Man and Environments in the Lake Rudolf Basin: Stratigraphy, Paleoecology, and Evolution. Pp. 552–564. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976a.

J. Desmond Clark and Glynn Isaac (eds.), Les plus anciennes industries en Afrique. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1976.

Glynn Isaac and Elizabeth McCown (eds.), Human Origins: Louis Leakey and the East African Evidence. Menlo Park, Calif.: W. A. Benjamin, 1976.

Glynn Isaac (with the assistance of Barbara Isaac), Olorgesailie: Archaeological Studies of a Middle Pleistocene Lake Basin in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

“The Food-Sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids.” Scientific American 238 (1978): 90-108.

Glynn Isaac and Richard Leakey (eds.), Human Ancestors: Readings from Scientific American. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979.

“Archaeological Tests of Alternative Models of Early Hominid Behaviour: Excavations and Experiments.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B 292 (1981): 177-188.

Ian Hodder, Glynn Isaac, and Norman Hammond (eds.), Pattern of the Past: Studies in Honour of David Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

J. Desmond Clark, Glynn Isaac, and Jean Combier (eds.), Las industrias más antiguas: pre-Acheulense y Acheulense. México City: Union Internacional de Ciencias Prehistoricas y Protohistoricas, 1981.

“The Cultures of the Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age.” In The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 1. From the Earliest Times to C. 500 B.C. J. Desmond Clark (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

“The Archaeology of Human Origins: Studies of the Lower Pleistocene in East Africa, 1971–1981.” Advances in World Archaeology 3 (1984): 1-87.

Glynn Isaac and Barbara Isaac, The Archaeology of Human Origins: Papers by Glynn Isaac. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Koobi Fora Research Project, Volume 5: Plio-Pleistocene Archaeology. (Edited by Glynn Isaac, with the assistance of Barbara Isaac). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Other sources

Jacquetta Hawkes, “The Proper Study of Mankind.” Antiquity 42 (1968): 255-262.

Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, “Recent Discoveries of Fossil Hominids in Tanganyika: At Olduvai and Near Lake Natron.” Nature 202 (1964): 5-7.

Jane Lancaster, “Carrying and Sharing in Human Evolution.” Human Nature Magazine 1 (1978): 82-89.

Secondary Sources

J. Desmond Clark, “Glynn Llywelyn Isaac, 1937-1985: A Personal Appreciation and Assessment.” The African Archaeological Review 4 (1986): 7-19.

Bernard Wood, ““Glynn Llywelyn Isaac, 1937-1985.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 70 (1986): 289-291.

J. Desmond Clark, “Glynn Llywelyn Isaac, 1937-1985.” Antiquity 60 (1986): 55-56.

Bernard Wood, “Glynn Isaac 1937-1985.” Nature 319 (1986): 15.

R. R. Inskeep, “Glynn Llywelyn Isaac.” The South African Archaeological Bulletin 41 (1986): 5.

“Glynn Llywelyn Isaac.” Azania 20 (1985): iv.

Robert J. Blumenschine, “Breakfast at Olorgesailie: The Natural History Approach to Early Stone Age Archaeology.” Journal of Human Evolution 21 (1991): 307-327.

Rhys Isaac, Glynn Isaac and the Search for Human Origins in Africa. (Inaugural Glynn Isaac memorial lecture delivered 21 April 1993). Rondebosch, South Africa: UCT Press, 1995.

Interview with Barbara Isaac (17 May 2007) available at http://www2.arch.cam.ac.uk/repository/barbara-isaac-2007.pdf