He joined the faculty of Duke University in 1970, eventually becoming Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Anthropology there.
[4] He also served as the senior associate editor for the International Encyclopedia of Biological Anthropology.
[3] Cartmill was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1983 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985.
His 1993 book A View to a Death in the Morning received both the W. W. Howells Award from the American Anthropological Association and the George Perkins Marsh Book Award from the American Society for Environmental History.
[4][5] In 2019, he received the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.