[4] Higham became interested in radiocarbon dating and moved to the University of Waikato where, in 1993, he obtained a DPhil degree at the Department of Chemistry.
He became the Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) in 2018 and was a Fellow by Special Election at Keble College.
The most notable result of this work was the redating of the Red Lady of Paviland,[12] an iconic early modern human from Britain.
Later, Higham reported an age estimate for the Kents Cavern maxilla from Devon, England, the earliest modern human fossil in northwestern Europe.
[14] In 2013, funded by the European Research Council, Higham launched the "PalaeoChron" Project that focuses on the dating of late Neanderthals, early modern humans and Denisovans at hundreds of sites across northern Eurasia.