John
Yellen Archaeology Program Director
National Science Foundation
and
Human Origins Program
National Museum of Natural History
John
Yellen
Archaeology Program Director
National Science Foundation
and
Human Origins Program
National Museum of Natural History
Dr. John Yellen is a Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and Archaeology Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He received his B.A. from Hobart College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from Harvard University. For many years he conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Bushman hunter-gatherers in the northern Kalahari Desert and also excavated archaeological sites in the region. His research focuses on the time period in Africa which saw the emergence of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans, from ca. 250,000 to 50,000 years ago and he has excavated relevant sites in Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Kenya. He is founder and President of the Paleoanthropology Society and has never found an early human fossil perhaps because he spends too much time looking at African birds. He also rows a scull on the Potomac River.