Melvin Joel Konner is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. He studied at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where he met Marjorie Shostak, whom he later married and with whom he had three children. He earned his PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1973. He spent two years doing fieldwork among the Kalahari San or Bushmen, studying infant development and the hormonal mechanism of lactational infertility. After six years on the Harvard faculty, he returned to school and received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1985. He then moved to Emory as department chair. From 1985 on, he contributed substantially in developing the concept of a Paleolithic diet and its impact on health, publishing along with Stanley Boyd Eaton, and later also with his wife Marjorie Shostak and with Loren Cordain. 

1946 in New York City