Henry McHenry

Henry M. McHenry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, where he joined the faculty in 1972 following his Ph.D. A UC Davis alumnus, he earned his bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1967 and a master's degree from the university before completing his Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard University in 1972. Throughout his over four-decade career, McHenry has been recognized for exceptional contributions to both undergraduate teaching and scholarly research. In 2000, he received the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, accompanied by a $30,000 award. Renowned for his rigorous yet entertaining classes on evolutionary anthropology, he engages students with fossil casts, guitar performances, and insights drawn from his own research, fostering intellectual curiosity and empathy as a former undergraduate himself.

McHenry's academic interests center on paleoanthropology, encompassing the tempo and mode of human evolution, phylogeny of Plio-Pleistocene hominids, hominid postcranial morphology and proportions, sexual dimorphism in human evolution, size and scaling, evolutionary history of hominid bipedalism, mastication, and encephalization, Miocene hominoids, human osteology, phylogenetic analysis, primate functional morphology, and transitions from Australopithecus to Homo. His extensive fieldwork includes sites in California for archaeology, the South Pacific island of Bougainville, and more than a dozen trips to Africa to study fossil remains. With over 130 publications since 1968, including contributions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica on human evolution, his analyses of comparative relationships among primate fossils and patterns of bodily change in hominins over geological time have appeared in Science, The New York Times, Discover, National Geographic, and numerous scholarly journals. McHenry's international influence is evident in his global lectures and editorial roles.

Professional Email: hmmchenry@ucdavis.edu