Dr. Leslie Aiello (1946- )
Brief biography
Oral history interview recorded April 17, 2024
Interviewer: Bernard A. Wood
Leslie Aiello followed up a distinguished career as a biological anthropologist by serving as President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Aiello’s research, which spanned evolutionary theory, life history, and the evolution of the brain and cognition, is perhaps best known for her focus on how the exigencies of energy constrained the evolutionary options of hominins, resulting in hypotheses that continue to influence researchers today. Throughout her time in academia, Aiello excelled as a teacher of both undergraduates and graduates.
Aiello spent all of her time as a full-time faculty member at University College London. As well as her research achievements she proved to be an able administrator, an aptitude that was recognized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation when they were searching for a new President. Aiello’s research interests–initially allometry and later energetics–played to her strengths in quantitative analysis. Particularly notable was her collaboration with Peter Wheeler to develop the ‘Expensive Tissue Hypothesis’, which suggested the substantial energetic costs of brain enlargement were partly ‘paid for’ by a concomitant reduction in the size of another ‘expensive tissue’, the gut. Aiello and Wheeler argued that a reduction in gut size would only have been possible if hominins had access to less bulky and higher-quality foods that required less physical processing by the teeth and jaws, and less chemical and physical processing in the gut.
Aiello’s long-standing interest in pedagogy was also expressed in her being the co-author, along with Christopher Dean, of the influential and ground-breaking An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy, which provided detailed explanations of the morphology unique to extinct hominins.
Leslie Aiello Oral History Video
Oral History Transcript
The transcript and narrative supplement below are free to read and download.
Narrative Supplement
This narrative supplement is a version of the transcript that has been edited for clarity.