Oral History of Human Origins: Yoel Rak

Dr. Yoel Rak (1946- )

Brief biography

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

Yoel Rak, who has worked for the whole of his career at Tel Aviv University–where he still teaches, is one of the few paleoanthropologists whose research interests run the gamut from early hominins to Neanderthals. He is a consummate morphologist with a reputation for seeing and appreciating the significance of morphological details his peers pass over. His thesis, which was published in 1983 as a book, The Australopithecine Face, became an instant classic.

Rak, who was a PhD student of Francis Clark Howell, has participated in fieldwork in Israel and Africa, where he has played a leading role in the discovery, description, and analysis of fossils recovered from sites such as Amud and Hadar. His career-long collaboration with Bill Kimbel, in both the field and the laboratory, was especially productive and significant for both. Their penetrating descriptions and analyses of the cranial morphology of Australopithecus afarensis function as benchmarks for the genre.

Rak’s career spans the time in paleoanthropology when there was, and still is, increasing emphasis on the use of 2-D, and now 3-D, measurements and landmark systems to describe morphology. Rak resisted this trend. claiming that many crucial morphological differences were not easily captured using these methods, but few have Rak’s uncanny ability to see and understand detailed morphological differences. Rak’s facility for discerning the functional implications of the distinctive morphology of early hominins was without equal. It is likely that his unique skill set was in part the product of decades of teaching medical students using dissected human cadavers, an experience that is impossible to duplicate using images projected on a screen.