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Frank B. Livingstone, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, died in Springfield, Ohio, on March 21, 2005. Over the course of a half-century of scholarship, he changed the scientific understanding of how human variation is distributed within and between populations and how such variation evolves over time. This core theme in Livingstone's work, coupled with his inexhaustible curiosity, prompted him to explore how the intersections of biology and behavior influenced disease, language, mating, genes, and the human capacity for adapting to, and modifying, the physical and cultural environment. A story, perhaps apocryphal, quotes him as having set for himself, early in his career, the goal of knowing all of anthropology. Few have come as close to that goal or savored the effort with as much passion and enjoyment.
Frank was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, on December 8,1928. He grew up fishing and playing ice-pond hockey-diversions he would enjoy throughout his adult life. He graduated from Winchester High School in 1946 and went on to Harvard, completing a Bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950. Although this training provided him with the skills to master the mathematics of population genetics (and incidentally to carry out formal analyses in kinship as well), it was an anthropology course taken during his junior year that introduced him to the field that would become his career and lifelong passion.
After two years in the army, Frank began graduate work at the University of Michigan. At that time, Michigan was an outstanding institution for studying human genetics, with James V. Neel, the elucidator of the inheritance of sickle cell hemoglobin, and Jack Schull, an accomplished mathematical geneticist, in the Department of Human Genetics. James Spuhler, among the first genetically sophisticated biological anthropologists, was a key figure in the Anthropology Department, along with Leslie White in cultural anthropology and James Griffin in archaeology. During his early graduate studies, the Human Genetics Department provided Frank with much-needed income (at one dollar per hour) as a "human calculator." Years later, graduate students witnessing him bang away on a Monroe ten-key to successively approximate a square root could begin to understand what the days before electronic computers must have been like.
Frank completed his doctoral degree at Michigan in 1957. Rare...