About our authors
Craig Stanford is a professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the University of Southern California, where he also co-directs the Jane Goodall Research Center. He has conducted field research on primate behavior in south Asia, Latin America and East Africa. He is well known for his long-term studies of meat-eating among wild chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, and of the relationship between mountain gorillas and chimpanzees in the Impenetrable Forest of Uganda. He has authored or coauthored more than 150 scientific publications. Craig has received USC’s highest teaching and research awards, including teaching awards for his introductory biological anthropology course. In addition, he has published 18 books on primates, animal behavior and human origins, including Planet Without Apes (2012) and The New Chimpanzee (2018). He lives in Southern California and is also very involved in environmental causes and nonprofit organizations around the world.
John Allen is Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington. Previously, he was a neuroscience researcher at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and the University of Southern California and was a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for several years. His primary research interests are the evolution of the human brain and behavior, and behavioral disease. He also has research experience in molecular genetics, nutritional anthropology, and the history of anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in Japan, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Palau. He has received university awards for teaching introductory courses in biological anthropology both as a graduate student instructor at the University of California and as a faculty member at the University of Auckland. In addition to Biological Anthropology, he is also the author of Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach (with Andrea S. Wiley; 4th Edition, 2021), The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind (2009), The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food(2012, winner of the WW Howells Award from the American Anthropological Association), and Home: How Habitat Made Us Human (2015). John and his wife, Stephanie Sheffield, have 2 sons, Reid and Perry.
Susan Antón is the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver & Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Anthropology in the Center for the Study of Human Origins, at New York University, where she serves as the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Faculty Development and Divisional Dean at Large for Arts and Science. She was founding Director of the Department of Anthropology’s graduate program in Human Skeletal Biology. Her field research concerns the evolution of genus Homo in Indonesia and human impact on island ecosystems in the South Pacific. She is best known for her research on H. erectus in Kenya and Indonesia, for which she was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. A former Ford Diversity Fellow, she is a founding member, former President, and current Treasurer of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows (seniorfordfellows.org), former President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (now AABA)and past editor in chief of the Journal of Human Evolution. She received awards for teaching as a graduate student instructor of biological anthropology and anatomy at the University of California, was Teacher of the Year while at the University of Florida, and received a Golden Dozen teaching award and the Distinguished Teaching Medal from NYU. She has been twice elected to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers, and received the AABA Gabriel Lasker Distinguished Service Award. Susan and her husband, Carl Swisher, a geochronologist, raise Anatolian shepherd dogs.
