Paul Mellars

Sir Paul Anthony Mellars (29 October 1939 – 7 May 2022) was a British archaeologist and professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge.

Early life and academic career Paul Anthony Mellars was born on 29 October 1939 in the village of Swallownest, near Sheffield. His father, Herbert Mellars, was a miner and a member of the Plymouth Brethren. From the village school, he progressed to Woodhouse, a County Council Grammar School founded in 1909 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, which his mother Elaine (née Batty) had also attended. (Woodhouse has subsequently been incorporated into the newly built Aston Academy in Swallownest.) Mellars obtained his MA, PhD and ScD degrees at the University of Cambridge, where he was a student at Fitzwilliam College. He married his wife Anny in 1969, having first met in an archaeological field trip in the Dordogne in 1964. He has held visiting positions at the Binghamton University and the Australian National University.

He served as president of the Prehistoric Society. He was also a trustee of the ACE Foundation.

Research Mellars' later research concentrated on the behaviour and archaeology of Neanderthal populations in Europe, and their replacement by Homo sapiens 40,000 years ago. He contributed to the three-part BBC mini-series "Dawn of Man – The Story of Human Evolution" (2000).

He also studied the way in which mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations in Britain adapted to climate changes following the last ice age. He carried out excavations on early Mesolithic sites at Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland and published the results from work at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.

Death Mellars died from cancer at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, on 7 May 2022, aged 82. a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1990 and a member of the Academia Europaea in 1999. In 2004, he was appointed an Officier of the Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Government.

He was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to scholarship.

Selected publications