James W. Wood is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University and a Senior Scientist in Penn State's Graduate Program on Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment, USA. His previous book, The Dynamics of Human Reproduction: Biology, Biometry, Demography (1994) won the 1995 W. W. Howells Prize for best book in biological anthropology awarded by the American Anthropological Association. He conducted several years' worth of fieldwork on the demography and ecology of subsistence farming in highland New Guinea and in the northern Orkney Islands of Scotland, and retired in 2017.
