Baruch Arensburg

rdf:langString Baruch Arensburg

rdf:langString Baruch Arensburg (born 1934 in Santiago, Chile), professor of Anatomy, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University (emeritus), is a physical anthropologist whose main field of study has been prehistoric and historic populations of the Levant. He studied at the Sorbonne University, Paris, Physical Anthropology and Comparative Anatomy. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he gained his degrees in the fields of Geography and Archaeology (B.A.) Geography and Zoology (M.A.). He was the first to study the demographic sequence of populations in the Land of Israel, starting with the Palaeolithic through the Biblical, Classical, Roman, Byzantine periods to the present (PhD topic, Anatomy and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, 1974). Concurrently he has been conducting on-going research of historic and recent Beduin populations. He has participated in many archaeological excavations and co-directed (with Ofer Bar-Yosef and Eitan Tchernov), the excavations at Hayonim Cave, mostly studying the Natufian (ca. 13,000 calBC) skeletal remains discovered therein. He also was a team member of the Kebara Cave Middle Palaeolithic project and was among those who studied and published the Mousterian (ca. 60,000 years old) skeleton recovered on site– his own research concentrating on the speech abilities of that individual, proving that his hyoid bone is identical to that of modern humans. At the same time he has studied many samples of human remains dating to the times of the Second Temple and is considered as the leading authority on the Jewish population of ancient Israel.