- Robert Broom, a Scottish physician and palaeontologist whose work on South Africa led to the discovery and description of “Mrs. Ples“
- James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a British judge most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics
- Raymond Dart, an Australian anatomist and paleoanthropologist, whose work at Taung, in South Africa, led to the discovery of Australopithecus africanus
- Charles Darwin, a British naturalist who documented considerable evidence that species originate through evolutionary change
- Richard Dawkins, a British ethnologist, evolutionary biologist who has promoted a gene-centred view of evolution
- J. B. S. Haldane, a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist
- William D. Hamilton, a British Evolutionary Biologist who expounded a rigorous genetic basis for kin selection, and on the evolution of HIV and other human diseases.
- Sir Alistair Hardy, a British zoologist, who first hypothesised the aquatic ape theory of human evolution
- Henry McHenry, an American anthropologist who specializes in studies of human evolution, the origins of bipedality, and paleoanthropology
- Louis Leakey, an African archaeologist and naturalist whose work was important in establishing human evolutionary development in Africa
- Mary Leakey, a British archaeologist and anthropologist whose discoveries in Africa include the Laetoli footprints
- Richard Leakey, an African palaetologist and archaeologist, son of Louis and Mary Leakey
- Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics
- Jeffrey H. Schwartz, an American physical anthropologist and professor of biological anthropology
- Chris Stringer, anthropologist, leading proponent of the recent single origin hypothesis
- Alan Templeton, geneticist and statistician, proponent of the multiregional hypothesis
- Philip V. Tobias, a South African paleoanthropologist is one of the world’s leading authorities on the evolution of humankind
- Erik Trinkaus, a prominent American paleoanthropologist and expert on Neanderthal biology and human evolution
Milford H. Wolpoff, an American paleoanthropologist who is the leading proponent of the multiregional evolution hypothesis.