18 Facts About Joseph Birdsell

Joseph Benjamin Birdsell was an American anthropologist known for his work on Indigenous Australians, which spanned from the 1930s through to the 1970s.

Joseph Birdsell was a long-serving professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Joseph Birdsell is best known for his "tri-hybrid" model of human migrations into Australia, which proposed three distinct waves of racially distinct populations.

Joseph Birdsell was born on 20 March 1908 in South Bend, Indiana.

Joseph Birdsell was the third child of Jane and John Comly Birdsell.

Joseph Birdsell's father worked for the Birdsell Manufacturing Company, which had been founded by his paternal grandfather John Birdsell, the inventor of the Birdsell Clover Huller.

Joseph Birdsell went on to study aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating Bachelor of Science in 1931.

Joseph Birdsell subsequently worked in New York City as a financial analyst for several years.

Tindale would study the genealogies, while Joseph Birdsell undertook the measuring, and with government support the pair travelled across south-east Australia, parts of Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania.

Joseph Birdsell taught anthropology at UCLA from 1948 until his retirement in 1974, continuing his research, and writing many articles and a widely used textbook on human evolution.

Joseph Birdsell was an associate editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from 1948 to 1951.

Joseph Birdsell's lifework was summarised in a monograph published in 1993 by Oxford University Press.

Joseph Birdsell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946, and several of his field seasons in the Australia were financed by the Carnegie Corporation.

Joseph Birdsell collaborated with US physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton, who was professor at Harvard when he was a graduate student.

Joseph Birdsell conducted further research in Australia from 1952 to 1954 and in 1973, "revisiting many of the people examined in the earlier expedition, as well as their descendants, and extending into northern and southern Western Australia and western South Australia".

Joseph Birdsell died on March 5,1994, in Santa Barbara of bone cancer.

Joseph Birdsell took a biological approach and did extensive work on anthropometrics to buttress his conjecture.

Joseph Birdsell theorized a distinctive model challenging the accepted view, outlining three variants for a northerly model positing a route through Sulawesi, and two for a conduit to the southern continent via Timor.