John Yellen serves as Program Director for Archaeology at the National Science Foundation and is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He received a PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University and is the founder and President of the Paleoanthropology Society. For many years he administered the national grants competition for the Explorers Club. He conducted extended fieldwork in the Kalahari Desert studying !Kung Bushman hunter-gatherers from an archaeologist’s perspective and has since excavated archaeological sites in The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Kenya. His research focuses on the processes which led to the emergence of behaviorally modern humans. He and his archaeologist-collaborator and wife, Alison Brooks, have two grown children, neither of whom are archaeologists.

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