Henry Harpending

Henry Cozad Harpending was an American anthropologist and writer. He was a distinguished professor at the University of Utah and formerly taught at Penn State and the University of New Mexico. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is known for the book The 10,000-Year Explosion, which he co-authored with Gregory Cochran. Some of Harpending's statements about race, biology, and intelligence were controversial. 

He is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a white nationalist and associated with groups described as such. Harpending was born in Dundee, New York, in 1944. He graduated from Dundee Central High School in 1961, received his A.B. degree from Hamilton College in 1964, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972. Harpending studied population genetics.

After graduating from Harvard, he worked at Yale (1972-1973), the University of New Mexico (1973–85), Penn State (1985-1997), and the University of Utah (1997-2016). Over his career, he contributed to over 120 publications. Harpending's first wife was Patricia Draper, with whom he had two children. He married his second wife, Renee Pennington, around 1995. They had one son. He died on April 3, 2016, at the age of 72, following a stroke.

According to a biography by Alan R. Rogers, in the 1970s, Harpending pioneered the study of the relationship between genetics and geography, developing methods that are still in use. He also overturned the prevailing understanding of group selection by showing that group selection is most likely to operate when there is strong gene flow between groups rather than when they are isolated from one another. 

Harpending also developed the approach of analyzing populations using R-matrix methods. Together with Trefor Jonkin, they wrote the most highly cited chapter in the 1973 handbook Methods and Theory of Anthropological Genetics. Harpending did fieldwork in Southern Africa (Botswana, Namibia) and spoke the ! Kung language.  In 1981, while with the University of New Mexico, Harpending studied the group during the South African Border War. 

Harpending described the ! Kung society is "like Rorschachs" because anthropologists could draw contradictory conclusions. His fieldwork was the basis of the 1993 monograph The Structure of an African Pastoralist Community with Pennington. Harpending also did extensive fieldwork on the Herero people, a cattle-herding group in the Botswana area. Herero is locally known for "their traditionalism, their wealth in cattle, and their dominating older women." 

Harpending's previous experience with the ! Kung people were useful because many Herero is bilingual! Kung. Harpending had previous contact with Herero from earlier research trips. In 1973, Harpending helped start the Kalahari People's Fund. The KPF was an outgrowth of the multidisciplinary Harvard Kalahari Research Group led by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore. 

In the 2005 paper "Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence," Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Harpending suggest that the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews may be attributed to natural selection for intelligence during the Middle Ages and a low rate of genetic inflow. They hypothesize that the occupational profile of the Jewish community in medieval Europe had resulted in selection pressure for mutations that increase intelligence but can also result in hereditary neurological disorders.