Lee Rogers Berger
Lee Rogers Berger ( born December 22, 1965 in Shawnee Mission, Johnson County ( Kansas), USA) is an American paleoanthropologist and archaeologist. Berger is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where it has also a permanent resident. He became internationally known for his study of the body proportions of Australopithecus africanus. Berger also discovered that the Taung Child - the first individual of the genus Australopithecus scientifically described - had been captured by a large bird of prey.
Career and research topics
Lee Berger was born in 1965 in Shawnee Mission, Kansas and grew up in Sylvania (Georgia ). He studied from 1985 at Vanderbilt University, visited in 1987, the East Georgia College and then the Georgia Southern University, where he graduated in the fields of biological anthropology, archeology and geology, graduating in 1989 with a bachelor's degree. In the same year he was transferred for a paleoanthropological doctoral dissertation at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where he has since lived; under the direction of Phillip Tobias, he explored the shoulder girdle early hominids.
Back in 1991, Berger began his long-term studies in the Gladysvale Cave, now a UNESCO World Heritage " Cradle of Humankind " part ( " cradle of mankind "). In the same year, the first since 1948, discovered in South Africa remains were there earlier salvaged Hominini of his team. 1993 Berger Researcher of the Paleo - Anthropology Research Unit ( PARU ) Witwatersrand University was. In 1994 he received a PhD degree in the subject of paleoanthropology with a thesis on The functional morphology of the hominoid shoulder girdle, past and present. He continued his studies as a post- doctoral student at the University of Witwatersrand, 1999, the appointed head of the Paleo - Anthropology Research Unit, and finally in 2004 the appeal to the reader (similar to the European professor ) in the field of human evolution.
Berger headed next to the excavation in Gladysvale also projects in Sterkfontein and Swartkrans. At times, he teaches his specialty in the United States: since 1997 at Duke University and since 1998 also at the University of Arkansas. His research is supported among other things by the National Geographic Society.
His published in 1995 hypothesis on the fate of the Taung skull, which was confirmed in 2006, and his study of the length of the limbs of Australopithecus africanus from 1998 were counted by Discover magazine on the hundred most important scientific publications of their appearance year. Berger argued, among others, that the Body of Australopithecus africanus which the earliest members of the genus Homo stand closer than that of Australopithecus afarensis.
A stir Berger also attended, after he had two thousand to three thousand year old remains investigated in 2006 during his vacation in Palau (Micronesia) of apparently very short statured people and 2008 researchers dispute arose as to whether it is with these people to a separate species of the genus Homo acted to a so-called Inselverzwergung or short stature of modern humans (Homo sapiens); This assessment, however, was immediately rejected by Palau experts as " deplorable farce ".
2010 Berger was the principal author of the first description of Australopithecus sediba, whose remains had first discovered in 2008 his then nine year old son in the Malapa Cave in South Africa. Also this find classified Berger as a possible transitional form between Australopithecus and Homo a what Donald Johanson opposite the journal Science commented himself, Berger was a " self-promoter " ( "grand stander "), which " often exaggerate " the significance of his findings.
Selected Publications
- Redrawing the family tree? In: National Geographic, Vol 194 (2 ), 1998, pp. 90-99
- Visions of the Past. With M. Reed. In: Vision. Published by the Endangered Wildlife Trust, 1999
- In The Footsteps of Eve. The Mystery of Human Origins. By Brett Hilton - Barber. National Geographic Society, Press Adventure Series, 2000, ISBN 978-0-7922-7682-1
- The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind. By Brett Hilton - Barber. Struik Publishers, 2002, ISBN 978-1-86872-739-1
- Working and Guiding in the Cradle of Humankind. Prime Origins Publishing, 2005 Full text ( PDF, 5.83 MB )
- A Guide to Sterkfontein & the Cradle of Humankind. By Brett Hilton - Barber. Struik Publishers, 2006