Professor Colin Groves AAH

Professor of Bioanthropology

I have done museum work on primates and other mammals all over the world. My lifelong studies on classification, variation and evolution of living primates culminated in 2001 with the publication of my book Primate Taxonomy (Smithsonian Institution Press), but it continues with new discoveries and new assessments. I am regularly invited to address conferences on this subject – most recently the so-called Goettingen Freilandtage (an annual conference of primatologists in Germany) in December, 2005, and the African Genesis symposium in Johannesburg in January, 2006.

I am also still publishing on human evolution (a paper in press with a PhD student, Debbie Argue, and two other colleagues, on the infamous Hobbit, Homo floresiensis), and on the taxonomy of ungulates and other animals, including elephants and carnivores. Biogeography is an increasingly important theme in my research, giving clues to reconstruction of past climates and geography.

My work has taken me to such places as Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, India, Iran, China and Indonesia. In the past few years I have done fieldwork in Sri Lanka and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I regularly collaborate in research with colleagues in Europe, China and Sri Lanka, among other places, although much of my research is sole- authored.

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