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Ashley Montagu, evolutionary anthropology's most eloquent voice for over fifty years, died in Princeton, New Jersey, in late November 1999 at age 94. Montagu's extraordinary career influenced many disciplines, including biological and sociocultural anthropology, the history of science, and developmental psychology. His publications, over sixty books and hundreds of articles, reflected an extraordinary erudition. Along with a superb grasp of the evolutionary sciences, Montagu brought to his writing, whether about the first dissection of a great ape (1943a) or the role of cooperative behavior in human evolution (1949), a wit shaped by a largely autodidactic classical education.
Montagu is often thought of as a generalist, but many of his early works were scientific and scholarly treatises on primate anatomy, such as his comparative study of the pterion region on the sides of primate skulls (1933). It is hard to categorize his oeuvre because of its great breadth, but three major domains of interest persisted over the decades of his life: the integration of evolutionary biology and behavior in the study of human development; the critical, empirical deconstruction of the category "race" as biologically meaningful; and the social and ethical implications of anthropology's role in public education.
Born Israel Ehrenberg in 1905 into a working-class Jewish immigrant family in London's East End, Montagu began in childhood to collect the works of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Fredrick Nietzsche from the stalls of used books that lined Whitechapel Road. He was particularly fascinated by the illustrations in anatomical and evolutionary texts of the period. By age ten he was observing the differences in language usage and accent between his cockney neighbors and educated university students sometimes taken in as lodgers by his parents to supplement their budget (Montagu, personal communication, April 4, 1999). Thus began his lifelong interest in the influence of the environment on the individual, a theme that resonates throughout his writings on human behavior. In early adolescence, he was given an old skull unearthed by the workman father of a friend who was building on the banks of the Thames River. At age 15, he took the skull in a paper bag to the Royal College of Physicians to show it to Sir Arthur Keith, at that time England's preeminent evolutionary anatomist....