Milford H. Wolpoff

1942 - Present

Milford Wolpoff, born in Chicago, Illinois in 1942, is a Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan. He taught at Case Western Reserve before becoming a professor. He has studied fossils and tool making but is most noted for his study on human evolution.

Dr. Wolpoff and his companion Rachel Caspari are leading researchers in the fields of race and human evolution. They are paleoanthropologists who have traveled to places all over the world to study human fossil remains. This research has helped to develop the multiregional framework to explain human evolution. That is, Wolpoff believes there was not one single ancestor, but several different ones all over the world. The “Eve” or “Out of Africa” theory holds that all living people are the descendants of a single African ancestor about 200,000 years ago. But multiregional evolution states that for about two million years humans have lived in several areas of the world and have evolved together because they met and interbred. This leads one to believe that there was not a single recent ancestor, but many, because there was no evidence of a new species or worldwide population replacements.

Together, Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari have written the book Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction that illustrates their research and their opinions on what they have discovered and what they believe.

References:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/wolpoff.html

http://www.pro-am.com/origins/multiregional/race.html

http://search.biography.com/print_record.pl?id=20911

http://www.variation1.com/

Written by Joseph M. Adam

Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007