Departmental News

Posted:  Aug 04, 2025 - 12:00pm

Dr. Jane Lancaster, UNM Distinguished Professor Emerita of Anthropology, passed away on August 3, 2025.  

Dr. Lancaster was a pioneer in the human evolutionary sciences. Her early research on primate behavior developed into groundbreaking work on the evolution of human society, touching on issues of sex roles, parenting, and life history strategies.  In 1990, she founded the journal Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective. In 2012 she was awarded the Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. In 2021 , she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Hillard Kaplan, long time colleague and friend, writes, "Jane was a mentor, role model, and inspiration for me, as she was to so many others. She pioneered new integrative directions for the field of anthropology, including major insights into sex roles, investment in children, and the complementary roles of biology and the social environment in shaping human behavior. She also selflessly nurtured the careers of so many young anthropologists and research scientists from other disciplines, especially supporting individuals without pedigrees but showing great potential. During her more than 30-year tenure at the UNM Anthro Department, she always played a unifying role, caring deeply about both her colleagues and the myriad graduate and undergraduate students she taught and advised. Her brilliance and radiating presence will be sorely missed."

In the June 2020 edition of Human Nature, Dr. Lancaster was honored for her groundbreaking work.  Dr. Louis Alvarado, current editor and UNM Alum (PhD, 2015), wrote: "Thirty years ago, Jane B. Lancaster penned her inaugural editorial, “An Interdisciplinary, Biosocial Perspective on Human Nature.”  With this, she launched an innovative journal that was instrumental to the nascent years of a maturing discipline. She outlined numerous urgent social issues of the time, all still topical, including climate change, social inequity and feminization of poverty, global hunger, and nuclear war. Any possibility of enacting solutions, she contended, requires an understanding of the very substance of our species. After all, famine appears irresolvable through agricultural innovation alone, and the threat of nuclear war is more than a technological issue. These sociocultural, -political, and -ecological quandaries must be approached with an unblinkered view of our nature, as collectively expressed in human behavior. Since its inception, Human Nature has become the vehicle that Jane envisioned, and in her retirement, she has left a gift to our field—an enduring beacon devoted to human diversity in its myriad forms."  Read the full editorial 

In his article Jane Lancaster and Human Nature: An Evolutionary Anthropology Pioneer, Dr. Robert Hitchcock (UNM PhD, 1982) wrote: "Jane Lancaster’s work is groundbreaking and trendsetting in a number of disciplines. In primate studies she worked on the similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman primates (see Lancaster 1975). Other areas include play and parenting, human mating and family formation strategies, and the evolutionary biology of women. Her work is intriguing not only because of its high scientific quality but also because of the breadth of areas that she has covered." Read the full article

Read Dr. Lancaster's  groundbreaking 1991 article  A Feminist and Evolutionary Biologist Looks at Women.