Thomas Griffith "Grif" Taylor (1 December 1880 – 5 November 1963) was an English-born geographer, anthropologist and world explorer.

In 1893, the family emigrated to New South Wales Australia, where James secured a position as a government metallurgist.

The explorer Robert Falcon Scott contracted Taylor to the Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica.

[4] He led a second successful expedition in November 1911, this time centering on the Granite Harbour region approximately 50 miles (80 km) north of Butter Point.

Taylor left Antarctica in March 1912 on board the Terra Nova, unaware of the fate of Scott's polar party.

Later that year, Taylor was awarded the King's Polar Medal and made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London.

Moreover, he claimed that due to climatic factors, the interior of Australia would be best settled by broad-headed Mongoloids who were better adapted to the environment.

Taylor saw theories that explained the genealogy of races as beginning in Africa and then expanding out through the world and evolving in positive ways as antiquated thinking from the 19th century.

Australoid and Negroid races were the first to branch off during humanity's evolution from the Neanderthal and were racially adapted to live in the world's margins.

Taylor openly disagrees with Wegener's theory of Continental Drift, writing that the human races evidently migrated into world's regions separately and over time.

Taylor links skin pigment to temperature and collects extensive data from the period on geology, topology, meteorology, and anthropology.

Taylor saw geography in a synthesising role between explanations of the physical world and the diffusion and evolution of the human species.

The fittest tribes evolve and survive in the most stimulating regions; i.e., where living is not so hard as to stunt mental development, and not so easy as to encourage sloth and loss of initiative.

In regards to racial variation within smaller regions, Taylor offers this passage about Europe's races: The Eur-African peninsula is now considered.

Thus the Savoyard of eastern France is akin to the wild tribes of the Pamirs, but not to the primitive peoples of the Dordogne only two hundred miles to the west.

[7] The most suitable parts of the world for habitation are, according to Taylor, in Europe, Western Siberia, the Americas, and Eastern China.

Taylor takes a seemingly contradictory viewpoint by both decrying miscegenation and saying that white Australian women who married Chinese men were OK to do so.

Taylor was close to Isaiah Bowman who shared similar interests in population and settlement studies.