In Memoriam - Ralph Holloway

The Department of Anthropology mourns the passing of Ralph Holloway. 

Ralph Holloway received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1964, and started at Columbia as an assistant professor immediately thereafter  He developed his fruitful research on the brain and human evolution entirely in our department. His main interest lay in paleoanthropology. His area of specialty was paleoneurology, which involves the study of brain endocasts. These are casts made from the interior of fossil cranial remains which provide information regarding the size of the once living brain, cerebral asymmetries, gyral and sulcal patterns if present, and morphometric shape, in a comparative perspective.

Holloway was a towering figure in the field who trained generations of physical anthropologists, and remained a champion of the four-fields approach to anthropology throughout his entire life.  

Holloway was born in Philadelphia, PA, first attending Drexel Institute of Technology, in metallurgical engineering. He finished his B.S. degree at the University of New Mexico majoring in Geology. His graduate work in physical anthropology was completed in 1964 at The University of California, Berkeley. His work nonetheless spanned continents. He worked on fossil hominin cranial remains in Europe, Africa, and Indonesia. Additionally, he was interested in modern human variation, sexual dimorphism, and behavior.

He will be remembered fondly by his colleagues, not only for his commitment to teaching and his love of research, but also for his wit, his political passion, and his devotion to the trumpet, which he played throughout his life and even during his final illness.