Theodore D. McCown was born in 1908 and graduated with an undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1929. In 1930, he was one of 12 student participants in the ASPR’s 10th summer term, which included extensive travel around Europe and excavation at the French site of Abri des Merveilles, although McCown most likely deviated from the rest of the group for part of the term because he was also helping out with excavations at Mount Carmel. The following year, he returned to Berkely as a graduate student, but during the summer seasons, he played a critical role in the Mount Carmel project. In the 3rd season of the project in 1931 he found the skeleton of a Neanderthal child in Mugharet es-Sukhul, and he led the following season himself, which uncovered 8 more neanderthal skeletons in Mugharet es-Sukhul. He worked with Sir Aurthur Keith in London to study these remains, and in 1938, he began working at Berkely as an instructor while continuing to publish about his findings. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel: The Fossil Human Remains from the Levalloiso-Mousterian, a seminal book about the Mount Carmel project, was jointly authored by McCown and Keith.
McCown’s research was not confined to the Levant. He did fieldwork in Peru in 1941-42, and later in India, in 1958 and 1964-65, after spending a few years doing military service in San Francisco. He became a professor of anthropology at Berkely in 1951, a position which he held until his death in 1969,