Lawrence Straus has been a professor of anthropology for 30 years at the University of New Mexico. He is a specialist in the Paleolithic prehistory of Western Europe and is currently excavating a large cave site in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain. He is the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research, a member of the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Quaternary Research and a member of the Commission on the European Upper Paleolithic of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences.