Baruch Arensburg

Who is Baruch Arensburg?

Baruch Arensburg, professor of Anatomy, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, 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 Geography and Zoology. 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. Concurrently he has been conducting on-going research of historic and recent Beduin populations.

He has participated in many archaeological excavations and co-directed, the excavations at Hayonim Cave, mostly studying the Natufian 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 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.