Franz Weidenreich

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Franz Weidenreich
Franz Weidenreich
Born	7 June 1873 Edenkoben
Died	11 July 1948 New York City
Nationality	Germany
Fields	physical anthropologist
Alma mater	University of Strasbourg
Known for	human evolution

Franz Weidenreich (7 June 1873, Edenkoben, Germany- 11 July 1948, New York City U.S.) was a Jewish German anatomist and physical anthropologist who studied human evolution. He studied at the University of Strasbourg (one of the leading German universities while Straßburg was still German) where he earned a medical degree in 1899. In 1903 Franz Weidenreich succeeded Wilhelm Pfitzner as Prosektor and was a professor there from 1904 to 1918 and at the University of Heidelberg from 1921 to 1924, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1934. In 1935 he succeeded Canadian paleoanthropologist Davidson Black as honorary director of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China.

In many ways, Franz Weidenreich was one of the most important and influential scientists studying human evolution in the Twentieth Century. For the first half of the Twentieth Century, almost all anthropologists believed that Piltdown Man was the ancestor of modern man. Piltdown Man had the characteristics that many scientists had predicted for a missing link, a large cranial capacity and ape-like teeth. The true "missing links" were the Australopithecus species that were just the opposite (small cranial capacity and human-like teeth) that anthropologists had hoped for. In the 1920's, thirty years before fluoride analyses proved that Piltdown Man was a hoax in 1953, Weidenreich examined the remains and correctly reported that they consisted of a modern human cranium and a orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth. Weidenreich, being an anatomist, easily exposed the hoax for what it was. However, it took thirty years for the scientific community to concede that Weidenreich was correct.

As honorary director of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory he also studied fossils of the Peking Man, then known as Sinanthropus pekinensis, unearthed at Zhoukoudian, China. Weidenreich originated the "Weidenreich Theory of Human Evolution" based on his examination of Peking Man. Being an anatomist, Weidenreich observed numerous anatomical characteristics that Peking Man had in common with modern Asians. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. According to the Weidenreich Theory, genes that were generally adaptive (such as those for intelligence and communication) would flow relatively rapidly from one part of the world to the other, while those that were locally adaptive, would not. This is contrary to popular theories of human evolution that have one superior race displacing other races. A vocal proponent of the Weidenreich theory was Carleton Coon.

Professor Weidenreich also renamed Gigantopithecus blacki to Giganthropus blacki, based on a theory that primitive forms of man were much larger than the more recent ones. However, as this theory is contradictory to the Cope-Deperet rule (which states that in straight evolution lines of non-flying animals the size of species increases, not the other way round), it was rejected by Professor Dr. von Koenigswald when he returned from the Japanese concentration camp after the Second World War.

[edit] References

• McCORT, J J (1957), “Franz Weidenreich; 1873-1948.”, N. Engl. J. Med. 257 (14): 670-1, 1957 Oct 3, PMID:13477368, <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13477368> 

[edit] External References

• Franz Weidenreich and Gigantopithecus