When graduating using the B.A. from Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, J. Desmond Clark became a conservator of Northern Rhodesia's Livingstone Memorial Museum in 1937. the year late Clark married Betty Behaume, world health organizatiin would accompany him on a total of expeditions throughout his life. Clark served in the armed forces in the period of World War II as well as carrying out archeological fieldwork in the Horn of Africa. Ensuing a war, he returned to Cambridge, completing his Ph.D. in 1947.

Clark so returned to Northern Rhodesia to serve once again when a Museum's director. Inside 1953, Clark ordered an excavation at Kalambo Falls, a 235m high, only-drop falls at a southeast prevent of Lake Tanganyika, on what is at present a border between Zambia and Tanzania. the places would sooner or later emerge when one of a first archeologic finds of the twentieth century, providing a record of other than cc & fifty thousand years of individual history. Up to now, artefact of Acheulean, Sangoan, Lupemban, Magosian, Wilton, and Bantu cultures have wholly been observed at a lessens. Clark as well undertook important fieldwork inside Ethiopia, Somalia, Malawi, Angola, and Niger, some of which led him to collaborate sustaining Louis and Mary Leakey.

Inside 1961, Clark became Prof of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his retirement in 1986. Under his counsel, a program became one of the world's first within paleoanthropology. Clark continued working until his dying, including the 1991 dig in China that was the number 1 to exist as led therewithin united states by foreign archeologist in further than Forty years. Clark died of pneumonia in Oakland in 2002, having published additional than twenty books & concluded 300 scholarly papers in human palaeontology & African prehistoric culture in the course of his career.

Selected works

A Prehistory of the Horn of Africa, 1954 Background to Evolution around Africa (with W. W. Bishop), 1967 A Prehistoric culture of Africa, 1970 A Cambridge History of Africa: From either a Earliest Days to c. Five hundred BC, 1982