Chris Turney holds a Chair in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter where he researches recent human evolution and migration, climate change and how people have responded to past variability. He completed a BSc in Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in 1994 and his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, on the end of the last ice age in the British Isles in 1997.

After finishing his PhD, Chris was ready for a change and spent the next two years in New Zealand and Australia looking at climatic and environmental variability and the timing of human colonization of the region over the past 60,000 years.  Chris returned to the UK in 1999 to teach and research at university.  In 2004, he had the fantastic opportunity to return to full-time research and expanded his research interests to Southeast Asia where he was fortunate to be involved in the discovery of a new species of human, Homo floresiensis (better known as the hobbits), on the island of Flores, Indonesia.  In 2006, Macmillan published his popular science book Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. He has a popular science website (http://www.christurney.com) which includes a virtual fieldtrip of the hobbit site and other early human archaeological sites across the Indonesian Archipelago.  His new book Ice, Mud and Blood: The Lessons from Climates Past is out now with Macmillan.