Marius Barbeau was a Canadian ethnographer and folklorist who is today considered a founder of Canadian anthropology. Barbeau's first research interest was the Native peoples of Eastern Canada, especially the Huron. His research included the songs, customs, legends, art and social organization of Native cultures in the Western and Prairie regions. A Rhodes Scholar, he is best known for an early championing of Québécois folk culture, for his exhaustive cataloguing of the social organization, narrative and musical traditions, and plastic arts of the Tsimshianic-speaking peoples in British Columbia, and other Northwest Coast peoples, and for his unconventional theories about the peopling of the Americas.In 1985 he was recognized as a "person of national historic importance" by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

Margaret Mead was arguably the most renowned anthropologist of all time, contributing to the development of the discipline, as well as, introducing its insights to thousands of people outside the academy. She produced 44 books and more than 1,000 articles.  Her publishings were translated into many languages. Some of Mead's early research on Samoa has been questioned, most notably by Derek Freeman, who argues that she was wrong about Samoan norms on sexuality. Nevertheless, her life-time achievements eclipse the controversy surrounding her earliest fieldwork.  She was a anthropologist who was a strong proponent of women's rights, who shone a light of understanding on human nature, and a clear and forceful entity who provided much knowledge to the field of anthropology and psychology.

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, historian, political critic, and activist. He is a professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. He has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. He has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Daniel Leonard Everett is an American author and is best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language. His new book, Language: The Cultural Tool explores his theory that language isn't innate but a tool developed by humans to solve problems. He has taught at the University of Manchester and is former Chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He is married to Linda Ann Everett.