C. Loring Brace developed an early interest in biology and human evolution as a child in part by reading Roy Chapman Andrews's popular book Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945).
He went to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts from 1948–52, where he constructed his own major from geology, paleontology, and biology courses.
He received a masters (1958) and doctorate (1962) from Harvard University and studied physical anthropology with Ernest Hooton and later with William W. Howells, who introduced Brace to the new evolutionary synthesis of Darwinian evolution and population genetics.
In 1962, Brace published a paper in American Anthropologist titled "Refocusing on the Neanderthal Problem" where he argued, in opposition to French anthropologist Henri Vallois, that the archeological and fossil evidence did not necessarily support the idea that the Neanderthals were replaced by Cro-Magnon populations migrating into Europe, rather than being ancestral to early Homo sapiens.
Here Brace traced the history of research on the Neanderthals in order to show how interpretations established early in the century by Marcellin Boule and notions such as Arthur Keith's pre-sapiens theory had convinced many anthropologists that the Neanderthals played little or no role in the evolution of modern humans.