UPDATE: As a brief update, Andrew is working in equal partnership with Liza Shapiro (Prof. of Anthropology, Univ. of Texas-Austin) and Brett Nachman (Graduate student at UT-Austin) on this project. The project is also going to continue to get updates as the phylogenies expand (currently at 732 people!).
W. Andrew Barr, a doctoral candidate at UT-Austin, appears to be undertaking the project that I think every biological anthropologist I know about has contemplated or fantasized about at some point. The project is an academic phylogeny of physical anthropology. Barr is constructing an interactive tree of who trained whom when it comes to physical anthropology Ph.Ds. This has been going viral on a number of online forums, and the early results look great.
I have always known, for example, that I was part of the large “Earnest Hooton” tree of American physical anthropology (a tree I expect to grow substantially as more users contribute data), having descended academically from Hooton, to William Howells, to Eugene Giles, to my advisor, Milford Wolpoff. It is great to see those interconnections laid out in attractive visual fashion.
Barr’s work on this looks great, but there are a few additional components I would love to see added. First, I would love to be able to add my undergraduate advisor (George Armelagos) in some fashion. Second, I would love to be able to expand the relationships to include doctoral committee members (in my case, that would add paleontologist Phil Gingerich, who is already on the list as part of the big Elwyn Simons tree, archaeologist John Speth, and biomedical engineer Steve Goldstein). Finally, I would love to be able to add dates and institutional affiliations, so that you could cross-reference who was at the same institution at the same time (major field work could be included, too). Adding these latter components would allow for a more thorough interrogation of the basic question, “where did so-and-so’s ideas come from?”
It is a cool project though, and if you have data to contribute and have not, you should go ahead and add yourself to the tree.
Thanks for the mentioning our site on your blog. Year of PhD and School are being tracked for each PhD. You can hover your mouse over a name to see it. Adding committee members is being considered for version 2.o, but that might be a ways off. Once we have the data in one place, it will be much easier to see what tools are needed to get the most use out of it.