Ralph Hulwai, an anthropologist who was pioneering in the idea that changes in the structure of the brain, and not only the size, died of human development, on March 12 at his home in Manhattan. It was 90.
His death was announced by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colombia, where he studied nearly 50 years ago.
The contradictory idea of ​​Mr. Holwai was that it was not necessarily the great brains of humans that distinguished them from monkeys or preliminary ancestors. Instead, the way human brains were organized.
Adams of several million years ago several years have not existed. But Dr. Holwai’s single focus on the interior designs crew of skull fossils, which it usually made from latex, was allowed to overcome this obstacle.
It is a “mandatory collection” information from these templates, it is books In the 2008 sheet. Decisively, they presented a representation of the external edges of the brain, allowing scientists to identify the structure of the brain.
Using the so -called Endocast, Dr. Holway was able to establish a boycott, for example, that a famous and controversial fossil skull of millions of grandparents of humanity belongs to a human being.
Taeung’s brain of the child was small, which prompted many to doubt the conclusion of Raymond Dart, the world of anatomy he discovered in the twenties of the twentieth century, that he was a human ancestor.
In 1969, Dr. Hulwaway took his family to South Africa to meet with Dr. Dart the elderly, to study Endocast from the natural limestone created by the child’s position in the quarry and his creation to create it.
He wrote in 2008, in order to “find an objective (methods) method to determine whether he had claimed in 2008, in order to” find an objective method (methods) to determine whether the shell was reorganized as Sam called before.
Dr. Holway focused on a crescent shape, called Lunate Sulcus, at the back of Endocast. In his opinion, he was placed like a person, which suggested that the doctor Dart was right all the time.
Others in the field insisted that the Tong Lyon was in the “front status of the typical monkeys”.
Now, the conclusions taken by Dr. Holwai and Dr. Dart were accepted about Lunate to a large extent: TAUG is a human predecessor.
“If you can determine its location and prove this, you can really prove that it is an aspect of reorganization,” Dr. Hulwai He said One of the interviews of the Antiquities Magazine in 2007.
This concept – the structure of the brain instead of its size – was the decisive factor in proving human origin.
“I was holding this position, as was the case in front of me, that reorganization occurred before the brain’s size increased,” Dr. Holway wrote in 2008.
“I believed at that time and remained convinced today that the oldest semen, i.e. Australopithecus Africanand A. Afarensisand And A. GarhiHe had brains that were definitely different from any monkey, despite their small size. “
Early of his career, he decided, unlike many of his peers, that just studying monkeys was not enough. “I could not understand the use of the chamomile as a theoretical model for understanding human development because I considered each type as a final product for their own line of evolutionary development,” he wrote.
Humans, the fossils of their ancestors, should be the focus of focus. “It was very important in the ancient science, in bringing the study of the brain development from being a marginal institution to the center,” said Chit Si Sherwood, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University.
“He did this by creating ways to rebuild cranial formation,” said Dr. Sherwood, who studied during the reign of Dr. Holwai in Colombia in the 1990s.
Dr. Holwai wrote that the confrontation between Dr. Hulwai and Barzageh “reorganization”, on the one hand, and neuroscientists who insisted that Tong and similar samples are more than monkeys, on the other hand, may become “very emotional charged.” From one of these meetings, he wrote that “fortunately, in 430 ml, Endocasts could not cause much damage even if they were thrown, although they are made of plaster.”
In some aspects, Dr. Holwai was the world of traditional anthropology, committed to what was once disciplined by the “four fields” of anthropology: archaeology and biological and linguistic anthropology. But this multidisciplinary approach has decreased long ago, as biologists have been increasingly pushed.
He wrote in 2008: “I was isolated and rapidly marginalized in Colombia, and kept it,” he wrote in 2008.
He was further isolated when he defended the educational psychologist Arthur R. Ginsen, who is mentioned by Harvard’s educational review article in the depth of 1969 and that imposes a genetic interpretation of the difference in the degrees of intelligence between black and eggs. Dr. Holwai, one of his colleagues, wrote “racist”, after “I had Teamerity to defend Arthur Jensen” from “asserting that Jensen was fanatic.” Some who knew him said that the charge was very unfair.
Ralph Leslie Holwai Junior was born on February 6, 1935, in Philadelphia, to Ralph Hulwai, who was in the field of insurance, and Margaret (Grago) Holway, a secretary. He enrolled in the secondary school in Philadelphia and registered in the Drexelle Institute of Technology Institute.
He later moved with his family to the Bouquerk, where he studied anthropology and geology at New Mexico University, and graduated in 1959 with a degree in geology.
After working for a while in the oil fields in southwest Texas and Lockheed aircraft in Borbank, California, the graduate program of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley entered, where he obtained a doctorate degree. In 1964, in that year, he was recruited by Colombia as an assistant professor, and he remained there until he retired in 2003.
Dr. Holway was an author or contributed to many books, including “The Role of Human Social Behavior in the Evolution of the Brain” (1975).
He survived his daughter, Margaret Holwai, and two grandchildren. Abnien, Eric and Benjamin, and his first and second wives, Louise Holwai and Daisi Duair died.
Throughout his career, Dr. Holwaway continued to focus on one member, the brain, and on the 3D modeling that he mastered to study its development.
“Because the human brain is the most important origin of experience and reality, it will be important to know how the matter has reached its current state,” he explained at the end of his career.
He continued: “Endocasts, that is, the tribes made from the inner table of the bone of the cranium, are somewhat poor things,” to achieve such an understanding, but this is all we have from the direct evolutionary history of your illness and should not be ignored. “
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