Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
Areas of Expertise
Human and primate origins and phylogeny systematics; cranial morphology; the functional anatomy and evolution of bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion
About
With a distinguished reputation as a leading scholar in biological anthropology, Dr. Matt Cartmill joined our department in 2008 with the long-term goal of building a world-class biological anthropology program at Boston University. He has published more than a hundred scholarly and popular works on the evolution of people and other animals and on the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology. Well known for his revolutionary analyses of the origins and early evolution of the ancestral primates, he has also made innovative contributions to scientific thinking about the origins and relationships of higher primates, prosimian anatomy, early hominin adaptations, quadrupedal locomotion, cranial evolution, and the philosophy of science. His award-winning 1993 book, A View to a Death in the Morning, is a witty and thoughtful dissection of the cultural assumptions behind the hunting hypothesis in human evolution. He is the co-author (with F. H. Smith) and illustrator of The Human Lineage, a comprehensive new (2009) survey of human evolution. The recipient of numerous awards for his research, writing, and teaching, Dr. Cartmill is a Guggenheim and AAAS Fellow, a former president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, a founding co-editor of the International Journal of Primatology, and the former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
While known among faculty for his wide-ranging knowledge—among other topics, he is an expert on animation—he is perhaps best known to his students for his vibrant sense of humor. BU offers undergrads a rare opportunity to take classes from such a world-class professor. If you are lucky, you may catch him teaching AN 102 in future years.
Selected Publications
- Cartmill, M., and K. Brown. 2017 . Posture, locomotion and bipedality: the case of the gerenuk (Litocranius walleri). In: Marom, A. and Hovers, E. (eds.), Human Paleontology and Prehistory: Contributions in Honor of Yoel Rak. Springer, New
York - Grochowski, C.O., Cartmill, M., Jerry Reiter, J., Spaulding, J., Haviland, J., Valea, F., Thibodeau, P.L., McCorison, S., and Halperin, E.V. 2014. Anxiety in first year medical students taking gross anatomy. Clinical Anatomy 27: 835-838.
- Cartmill, M., and F. H. Smith. 2009. The Human Lineage. Wiley-Blackwell, New York: x, 624 pp.
Courses
- CAS AN 337 Creation and Evolution
- CAS AN 550 Human Skeleton
- CAS AN 331 Human Origins
- CAS AN 705 Proseminar in Biological Anthropology