Robert A. Foley

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Robert A. Foley (born 1949) is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies and Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge. He was educated at Ardingly College and Peterhouse College, Cambridge where he earned a B.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology. He is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Foley is the leading light of the Cambridge school in evolutionary biology which argues, within the context of the Out of Africa theory of human origins, for two waves of migrations by homo sapiens. The competing Oxford school, championed by Stephen Oppenheimer, holds that there was just one migration across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the end of the Red Sea. The two schools also diverge on when they date the migrations. While the Oxford school places it before the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago, the Cambridge school believes the first migration occurred nearer to 60,000 years ago. This dispute should eventually be settled by the Genographic Project initiated by the National Geographic Society and IBM.