Dr. Howell died of metastatic lung cancer on March 10, 2007, at age 81 at his home in Berkeley, California.
That had to wait until he worked on lower Pleistocene deposits dating from 2.1 - 0.1 Mya in the Omo River region of southern Ethiopia.
Howell also played significant roles in several other evolution and natural sciences organizations including the Stone Age Institute[1] in Bloomington IN, the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), the Institute for Human Origins[2] ('IHO'), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Center for Science Education ('NCSE') and the Human Evolution Research Center[3] ('HERC') at the University of California at Berkeley, which he co-managed for over thirty years with his colleague Tim D. White.
Finally, Howell wrote a popular mainstream book on human evolution, Early Man,[6] which was published in 1965 as part of the Time-Life's LIFE Nature Library series (see March of Progress (illustration)).
In February 2007 one month before his death he sat down for interviews totaling 8 hours[7] with Samuel Redman of the Bancroft Library's Oral History Center.
He received the Charles Darwin Award for lifetime achievement from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists[11] and the Leakey Prize in 1998 from the L.S.B.
In addition to Early Man, a volume of the Life Nature Library, Howell wrote more than 200 scientific papers and reviews.