Oral History of Human Origins Research: Ralph Holloway

Dr. Ralph Holloway (1935-2025)

Oral history interview recorded in 2023
Interviewer: Bernard A. Wood

Brief biography

Ralph Holloway was a faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University for close to six decades. Although his undergraduate degrees were in metallurgical engineering and geology, at graduate school his interests switched to the brain, and the topic of his 1964 PhD thesis from the University of California at Berkeley was “Some Aspects of Quantitative Relations in the Primate Brain.” With the help of graduate students, Holloway explored many aspects of the macro- and microstructure of the brain of extant primates, but he is best known for creating the sub-discipline of hominin paleoneurology, the blueprint and prospectus for which he set out in his 1973 James Arthur Lecture.

A little over a century ago, Raymond Dart announced the discovery at Taungs (now Taung) of a juvenile skull of the first early hominin from Africa, that he named Australopithecus africanus. Most of the back of the cranium was missing, but when the cranium was more intact than it is now, sand in the cave had filled the cranial cavity, resulting in a brain-shaped rock (aka natural endocast) that preserved the size, shape, and surface morphology of the brain. Natural endocasts as well-preserved as the Taung juvenile are extremely rare, but Holloway reasoned that if a way could be found to replicate the endocranial morphology of better-preserved early hominin crania⎯as well as the crania of our closest relatives, the African apes⎯then he would be able to track the evolution of the size and shape of the neocortex, and other parts of the brain, within the hominin clade. Holloway discovered that if liquid latex was introduced into the cranial cavity and left to cure, it could be extracted via the foramen magnum and used to make a facsimile of that individual’s brain (aka reconstructed endocast). Developments in imaging have made Holloway’s technique redundant, but for many years it was the only way to access the endocranial morphology of fossil hominins.

Holloway’s interpretations of the early hominin endocranial casts he studied were relatively uncontroversial, but his claim that the Taung juvenile’s endocast provided evidence of cranial re-organization has been challenged.