Valerius Geist

Geist's interest in Neanderthal people was captured in a National Geographic article suggesting that Neanderthal may not have learned to throw, supported by their hunting methods. He noted the likely possibility that they engaged in cannibalism, and that they may have actually ranched children from other tribes for food. He suggested that ancient cave art was more likely to be graffiti, left by young men who dared one another to go deep into the earth to make their marks. In this, he strongly supported R. Dale Guthrie's published views The Nature of Paleolithic Art by Guthrie R. Dale (2006-02-01).

Regarding the behavior of wolves towards human beings he described seven steps from strong shyness and avoiding the nearness of the human, then searching anthropogenic food sources and habituation, then possible explorative attacks, in which they only approach, up to predatory attacks on people, that usually take place only under the precondition that the seven steps described by him are passed through. He became involved in the inquiry surrounding the death of Kenton Carnegie November 8, 2005 at Wollaston Lake, Points North Landing, Saskatchewan, Canada. Geist expressed growing concern as wolves began to follow his wife outside their home on Vancouver Island and threaten her safety. When wolves appear friendly, they are simply examining the menu. He was openly critical of the myth that wolves do not attack people and observed that Joseph Stalin promulgated this Big Lie in his effort to disarm the rural population which had traditionally kept firearms for protection.

Geist won the Wilderness Defenders Award from the Alberta Wilderness Association in 2004. He is the only North American hunter to be honored with professional membership in both the Boone and Crockett Club and its European counterpart, the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation (Conseil International de la Chasse).

Since 1977, he has taught at the University of Calgary, where he was a founding member and first Program Director of Environmental Science in the Faculty of Environmental Design. He resided on Vancouver Island, B.C.

He earned a B.Sc. in zoology (1960), and Ph.D. in zoology (1967), both from the University of British Columbia. He completed his postdoctoral studies in Seewiesen, Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology (1967-1968) under Konrad Lorenz. His doctoral thesis was entitled On the behaviour and evolution of American mountain sheep.

Valerius Geist (2 February 1938 – 6 July 2021) was a Canadian biologist and a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. He was a specialist on the biology, behavior, and social dynamics of North American large mammals (elk, moose, bighorn sheep, other wild ungulates and wolves), and well respected on his views of Neanderthal people and behavior.

He was born on February 2, 1938, in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, USSR and raised in Austria and Germany. In 1961 he married the biologist Renate Geist, née Brall (1937 - 2014).