Peter Andrews: "Miocene Apes: forest or woodland savanna environments"

Peter Andrews worked for several years in the Kenya Forestry Department before switching to Anthropology with the support of Louis Leakey, and he worked for several more years at the Kenya National Museum. He then moved to the Natural History Museum, ending up as head of human origins. He is now retired and living in Dorset, where he is curator of Blandford Museum. He has worked on fossil apes in Kenya, Turkey and elsewhere, and he has a particular interest in linking the adaptations of fossil apes and early hominins with the environments in which they lived. He has developed several new methods of palaeoecological analysis, based always on ecological principles, and he has emphasised the importance of taphonomic analysis of fossil faunas and floras before using them as evidence of palaeoecology. In the past two years he has published a book on human evolution based on the evidence of fossil apes, a co-authored atlas of taphonomy, and a co-edited book on the results of his excavations at a cave site in Armenia.