Tom Higham

Originally from New Zealand, Tom Higham is currently Professor of Scientific Archaeology at the University of Vienna’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology. He came to Vienna in August 2021. For 20 years prior to this he was the Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, at the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology. This is one of the world’s top radiocarbon dating laboratories. Tom is a specialist in radiocarbon dating using particle accelerators. Tom’s main area of research centers on the Palaeolithic period, particularly the time of the last Neanderthals and the arrival of the first modern humans coming out of Africa. He has worked on more than 100 archaeological sites dating to this period across Eurasia. He is also one of the team working at the important Russian site of Denisova Cave, where a new species of humans was found in 2011 (the Denisovans). Tom has published more than 100 scientific papers. His recent book, The World Before Us: How science is revealing a new story of our human origins, was published in 2021 by Penguin/Random House.