1. Dean Falk was born on June 25,1944 and is an American academic neuroanthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates.
12 Facts About Dean Falk
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Dean Falk is the Hale G Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University.
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Dean Falk formulated the "radiator theory" that cranial blood vessels were important for hominin brain evolution, and the "putting the baby down" hypothesis that prehistoric mothers and infants facilitated the emergence of language.
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In 2017, Dean Falk coauthored a study with Charles Hildebolt on warfare in small-scale and state societies, which found that people are no less violent today than they were in the past.
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Dean Falk coauthored a 2018 book on Asperger's syndrome with her 24-year-old granddaughter who has Asperger's, and, in 2019, published a refutation of the allegation that Hans Asperger was a Nazi sympathizer.
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Dean Falk undertook a collaborative study in 2005 that described Hobbit's endocast and supported the claim that the find represented a new species.
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Dean Falk has participated in other studies that refute the idea that LB1 had Laron syndrome or Down syndrome.
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Dean Falk led a team that described the entire cerebral cortex of Albert Einstein in 2013, and collaborated with Weiwei Men et al.
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In 2014, Dean Falk published her work on "Interpreting sulci on hominin endocasts: old hypotheses and new findings in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience".
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Dean Falk's work summarized what paleoneurologists could potentially learn about human brain evolution from fossils, which is confined to information about the evolution of brain size and how limited parts of the cerebral cortex became reorganized during evolution.
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Dean Falk noted that the cerebral cortex is a highly evolved part of the human brain and that it facilitates conscious thought, planning, language, social skills, and scientific, artistic, and musical creativity.
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Dean Falk observed that these studies exclude the internal brain structures that cannot be described by paleoneurologists because they do not show up on endocasts.