Joseph Birdsell
American anthropologist
Joseph Benjamin Birdsell (March 30, 1908 – March 5, 1994) was an American anthropologist known for his work on Indigenous Australians, which spanned from the 1930s through to the 1970s. He was a long-serving professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is best known for his "tri-hybrid" model of human migrations into Australia, which proposed three distinct waves of racially distinct populations. The "Birdsell model" was popular in the mid-20th century, but was later found to be unsupported by scientific evidence.
Early life
Birdsell was born on 20 March 1908 in South Bend, Indiana. He was the third child of Jane (née Defrees) and John Comly Birdsell. His father worked for the Birdsell Manufacturing Company, which had been founded by his paternal grandfather John Birdsell, the inventor of the Birdsell Clover Huller.
Birdsell attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He went on to study aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating Bachelor of Science in 1931. He subsequently worked in New York City as a financial analyst for several years.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Birdsell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.