Franz Weidenreich

Franz Weidenreich ( born June 7, 1873 in Edenkoben; † July 11, 1948 in New York City ) was a German anatomist and anthropologist who became famous for his studies on the evolution of man.

Life

Weidenreich studied until 1899 at the University of Strasbourg medicine. In 1903, he joined the successor of Wilhelm Pfitzner as prosector at the University of Strasbourg and in 1904 was appointed professor. Until 1918 he worked in Strasbourg. From 1921 to 1924 he was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. In 1928 he founded the Institute for Physical Anthropology at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 1934 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and in 1935 successor of Davidson Black as a professor at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory in Beijing. There he explored ( Sinanthropus pekinensis, Homo pekinensis later ) those found in the 1920s and 1930s, fossil remains of the so-called Peking Man, who is now usually attributed to the Homo erectus. 1941-1948 Weidenreich was assistant at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Weidenreich was the uncle of 1923 born in Berlin as Peter Weidenreich author Peter Wyden.

Works (selection)

• Race and body type. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1927
• A new Pithecanthropus Fund in China. In: Nature and Museum, Volume 60, Number 12, 1930, pp. 546-551
• Race and soul. JA Barth, Leipzig 1932
• The ramification of the middle meningeal artery in fossil hominids and its bearing upon phylogenetic problems.In: Paleontologica Sinica, New Series D, No. 3 (whole ser no 110. ), Peiping, 1938, pp. 1-16
• The Skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis; A Comparative Study on a Primitive Hominid Skull. Pehpei 1943 ( archive.org )
• Apes, giants, and man. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1946
• Facts and speculations Concerning the origin of Homo sapiens. In: American Anthropologist, Volume 49, No. 2, 1947, pp. 187-203