Following graduation, he attended Oberlin College for his undergraduate education where he was involved in the liberal political and social culture of the late 1960s.
He later received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1976 at the age of 26 under the advisorship of Frank Livingstone, Milford Wolpoff and C. Loring Brace.
[10] His work concerning the extinct subfossil lemurs focused on their initial isolation in the virtually predator-free environment of Madagascar, their subsequent adaptive radiation, and the unusual morphological and behavioral diversity that resulted as a consequence.
[11] He has worked on hominid bipedalism being due to the unique muscular and skeletal constraints required for locomotion in humans and their ancestors, and the apparently ancient anatomy of the recent "hobbit" fossils, possibly influenced by insular dwarfism.
By the end of 2009 Jungers had written more than 150 peer-reviewed articles about the relationship between form and function in many primate species, both extinct and extant.