Henry Harpending has died, Gregory Cochran reports:
He suffered a stroke 3 weeks ago. Within a few days, he also had a MRSA infection in his lungs. The docs eventually cleared that, but his lungs never recovered. He died this afternoon of Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome.
Harpending was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah.
Cochran and Harpending wrote The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. I didn’t realize Steve Sailer had brought them together:
The great anthropologist Henry Harpending (1944-2016) has died. A genial polymath, Henry bridged the gap in anthropology between the old-fashioned cultural side (having spent almost 4 years in the field in Africa with Bushmen and Herero hunter-gatherers, at one point almost giving up academia to become a safari hunting guide) and the ascendant genetic side of anthropology.
It’s my honor to have brought Henry and Gregory Cochran into contact around 1999.
Harpending and Cochrane were two bright shining lights in the dark night of anthropology. Now we only have one.