Sally McBrearty is an American

paleoanthropologist Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinsh ...

and Paleolithic archaeologist. She was a professor and head of the anthropology department at the

University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from H ...

Education and career

McBrearty studied at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univers ...

, completing her PhD at Illinois in 1986. She joined the

in 1994, was appointed a professor in 2002, and head of the department of anthropology in 2008. Previously, she held positions at

Brandeis University Brandeis University is a Private university, private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts. Founded in 1948 as a nonsectarian, non-sectarian, coeducational institution sponsored by the Jews, Jewish community, Brandeis was established on t ...

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

, and the

College of William & Mary The College of William & Mary (officially The College of William and Mary in Virginia, abbreviated as William & Mary, W&M) is a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. Founded in 1693 by letters patent issued by King William II ...

. She was elected a fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

in 2007.

Research

Middle Stone Age in Africa

McBrearty's work on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa helped to revolution understandings of modern human behavior. With colleague Alison S. Brooks, McBrearty published "''The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior''," one of the most-cited papers in the history of Paleolithic archaeology. This paper argued that behavioral modernity arose in Africa over a long period of time, and that it is visible very early in the MSA archaeological record. This view challenged European-centric models for human evolution that argued for a sudden appearance of behavioral modernity in Europe during the

Upper Paleolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coi ...

Chimpanzee evolution

McBrearty and her colleague Nina Jablonski are credited with the discovery of the first known chimpanzee

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s. McBrearty collected the first fossil, a molar tooth, during her surveys at

Kapthurin The Kapthurin Formation is a basalt outcrop in Kenya near Lake Bogoria and Lake Baringo. Part of the East African Rift System, it is also an important archaeological site in the study of early humans who occupied the area and left Acheulean ...

in the East African Rift Valley in 2004, and immediately suspected that it belonged to an ape. Joblonski, a specialist in

monkey Monkey is a common name that may refer to most mammals of the infraorder Simiiformes, also known as the simians. Traditionally, all animals in the group now known as simians are counted as monkeys except the apes, which constitutes an incom ...

fossils, then examined the tooth and positively identified it as chimpanzee. She also found a second example, an

incisor Incisors (from Latin ''incidere'', "to cut") are the front teeth present in most mammals. They are located in the premaxilla above and on the mandible below. Humans have a total of eight (two on each side, top and bottom). Opossums have 18, w ...

, in the same collection. The following year McBrearty's team returned to Kapthurin and discovered a further two fossil chimpanzee teeth. They believe that all four teeth belonged to the same individual. McBrearty and Jablonski announced the discovery in a paper in ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...

'' in 2005. As well as being the first known chimpanzee fossils, the teeth were the first fossils of modern, non-human apes found in Africa. Dating to around 500,000 years ago, they were also discovered outside the range of modern chimpanzees, overturning a previous idea that the Rift Valley was a barrier to the species. McBrearty has proposed that fossils of chimpanzees are scarce because their preferred habitat—the wet jungles of Central and

West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mau ...

—experience poor conditions for preservation. Researchers did not expect to find the ancestors of chimpanzees in the drier savannahs of the Rift Valley, typically seen as the

ecological niche In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. Three variants of ecological niche are described by It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (fo ...

of archaic humans, but McBrearty believes that there are more examples there because of the better preservation.

Personal life

McBrearty lives in

Glastonbury, Connecticut Glastonbury ( ) is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, formally founded in 1693 and first settled in 1636. It was named after Glastonbury in Somerset, England. Glastonbury is on the banks of the Connecticut River, southeast o ...

. She was married to Andrew Hill, also a paleoanthropologist, until his death in 2015.

References

External links

Personal website
{{DEFAULTSORT:McBrearty, Sally Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American paleoanthropologists American archaeologists American women archaeologists American women anthropologists Prehistorians University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni Brandeis University faculty Yale University faculty College of William & Mary faculty University of Connecticut faculty Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science