Academic Career
Howell began his career in the Anatomy Department of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1953, and stayed there for only two years before moving back to his alma mater, the University of Chicago. He went on to spend the next 25 years of his career there in the Department of Anthropology. He achieved a professorship in 1962 and became chairman of the department in 1966. In 1970, Howell moved to the University of California, Berkeley following his mentor Washburn. This time he stayed for good, remaining a professor and then an emeritus until his death.
Howell's early work focused on Homo neanderthalensis for which he made trips to Europe beginning in 1953. His later work brought him to Africa, the cradle of mankind. From 1957 to 1958, he worked at Isimila, Tanzania, where he recovered enormous hand-axes dating from the Acheulean (260,000 years old). Continuing his study of the Acheulean period he excavated in Spain (1961 to 1963) at the sites of Torralba and Ambrona which are 300,000 to 400,000 years old. At none of these sites did he find skeletal material however. That had to wait until he worked on lower Pleistocene deposits dating from 2.1 - 0.1 Mya in the Omo River region of southern Ethiopia. There he found vertebrate fossils of monkeys as well as hominids. It was here that he also pioneered new dating methods based on potassium-argon radioisotope techniques.
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