Preface

I began compiling biographical entries for what would become the Biographical Dictionary of the History of Paleoanthropology in 2013 as a result of discovering in the course of my research on the early history of paleoanthropology that remarkably little biographical information was readily available in English for some figures who were quite prominent in their own time. The Biographical Dictionary of the History of Paleoanthropology is dedicated to providing biographical entries primarily for those paleoanthropologists for whom either little biographical information is available in English or for whom little biographical information exists in any language. Since lengthy biographies exist for many leading paleoanthropologists, I do not intend to duplicate that work here. Instead, I have focused on providing biographical entries for nineteenth-century paleoanthropologists as well as those twentieth-century paleoanthropologists that have not been the subject of extensive biographical research. The online format of the Biographical Dictionary of the History of Paleoanthropology allows me to offer biographies of greater length than is possible in many published biographical dictionaries and to also provide more complete bibliographies of each scientist’s publications as well as scholarly literature for each individual. The plan is to continue to add new biographies each year.

Matthew R. Goodrum
Professor of History of Science
Department of Science and Technology in Society
Virginia Tech