Franz Weidenreich

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Franz Weidenreich (born June 7, 1873 in Edenkoben , † July 11, 1948 in New York City ) was a German anatomist and anthropologist who became known for his studies of human evolution . In 1940 he became a citizen of the United States .

Life

Contribution to Wilhelm Roux's Archive for Development Mechanics of Organisms (1921)

Weidenreich was the youngest of four children of Jewish parents. After attending the humanistic grammar school in Landau , he studied medicine in Munich , Kiel , Berlin and finally at the University of Strasbourg , where he received his doctorate in 1899 . After that, Weidenreich was assistant until 1901, after his habilitation private lecturer in anatomy at the University of Strasbourg under Gustav Schwalbe , an anthropologist and researcher of the Neanderthal . In 1903 he succeeded Wilhelm Pfitzner as a prosector at the University of Strasbourg. In 1904 he was appointed professor of anatomy there, a position he held until 1918. From 1921 to 1924 he was a professor and scientific member of the Cancer Institute at Heidelberg University .

He was temporarily chairman of the Democratic Party of Alsace-Lorraine and during the First World War city ​​council in Strasbourg. The author Peter Wyden , born in Berlin in 1923 as Peter Weidenreich, was his nephew.

research

At the end of 1928, Weidenreich took on a teaching position for physical anthropology and racial studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . Initially unpaid, he founded and headed the Institute for Physical Anthropology from 1929, and from 1930 as honorary professor. In his anthropometric investigations, Weidenreich came to the conclusion that "it is not an isolated purebred [...], but on the contrary, racial penetration that leads to the highest level of cultural development". Weidenreich belonged to the so-called Hindenburg Jews (front-line fighters in World War I) and was therefore not released in 1933. After the seizure of power of the Nazis , he was due to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil on leave from summer semester 1934 but unpaid.

He emigrated to the USA and was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago until December 1934 (his license to teach in Frankfurt was revoked in 1935). Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer later took over his position . In Beijing in 1935, he was offered the successor to the late Davidson Black , who was the first to describe the so-called Peking people , as a visiting professor at the Union Medical College of Tsinghua University . There and at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Rockefeller Foundation, he researched and documented the fossil remains of the Peking man, who is now mostly assigned to Homo erectus , that was found in the 1920s and 1930s . All finds of the Peking man from this time were lost in the turmoil of the Second World War, thanks to Weidenreich's detailed drawings and because he had high-quality casts made of all the fossils, even after the loss of the originals there are still scientific adaptations of the Finds remained possible. Like many other US citizens, Weidenreich left China as a result of the Japanese invasion and went back to New York in 1941, where he continued to receive his salary from the Rockefeller Foundation for his work in Beijing.

From 1941 to 1948 Franz Weidenreich was a research fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. After returning from China, he was one of the founders of the hypothesis of the multiregional origin of modern man . He transferred the fact that people of all ethnicities living today have fertile descendants to the past and assumed that there was only one ancestor species in the past , whose regional variants develop largely independently of one another to form anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) would have. In 1947, for example, he argued that the hominine fossils discovered in China (including Gigantopithecus ) were the remains of ancestors of today's North Asian "Mongolian group", the fossils of the Java man worked by Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald were the remains of ancestors of today's "Australians." Group ”, and the Neanderthal fossils are the remains of ancestors of today's Europeans .

Due to numerous fossil finds from Africa and due to genetic markers , the multiregional model was later replaced by the out-of-Africa theory - the assumption that the genus Homo had its sole origin in Africa. Ian Tattersall , a successor to Weidenreich at the American Museum of Natural History , also pointed out that Weidenreich was subject to a double misunderstanding: As an anatomist , he had disregarded the basic principles of biological systematics - the criteria for the delimitation of species - and also the process of evolution mistakenly interpreted in terms of orthogenesis .

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Race and physique. Julius Springer, Berlin 1927.
  • A new Pithecanthropus find in China. In: Nature and Museum. Volume 60, No. 12, 1930, pp. 546-551.
  • Race and spirit. JA Barth, Leipzig 1932.
  • Fundamental to the race question. In: The medical world. February 18, 1933, p. 247 ff.
  • The ramification of the middle meningeal artery in fossil hominids and its bearing upon phylogenetic problems. In: Paleontologica Sinica. (No. 110). New series D, No. 3, Peiping 1938, pp. 1-16.
  • Six lectures on Sinanthropus pekinensis and related problems. In: Bulletin of the Geological Society of China [= Acta Geologica Sinica ]. Volume 19, No. 1, 1939, pp. 1-111, doi: 10.1111 / j.1755-6724.1939.mp19001008.x , overview
  • The Skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis. A Comparative Study on a Primitive Hominid Skull. In: Paleontologica Sinica. (No. 127). New episode D, No. 10, Pehpei 1943, pp. Iii - 484, full text at archive.org
  • The 'Neanderthal man' and the ancestors of 'Homo sapiens'. In: American Anthropologist. Volume 45, No. 1, 1943, pp. 39-48.
  • Apes, Giant 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, doi: 10.1525 / aa.1947.49.2.02a00010

literature

  • Alan Walker , Pat Shipman: The Man Who Lost the Missing Link. Chapter 4 in: The Same: Turkana Boy. In search of the first person. Galila Verlag, Etsdorf am Kamp 2011, ISBN 978-3-902533-77-7 , pp. 83-102.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frankfurter Personenlexikon.
  2. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , pp. 42 and 53.
  3. ^ Franz Weidenreich: Facts and speculations concerning the origin of Homo sapiens. In: American Anthropologist. Volume 49, No. 2, 1947, pp. 187–203, doi: 10.1525 / aa.1947.49.2.02a00010 , full text (PDF)
  4. ^ Ian Tattersall : The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack - and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2015, pp. 56-58, ISBN 978-1-137-27889-0 .
  5. ^ List of members Leopoldina, Franz Weidenreich
personal data
SURNAME Weidenreich, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anatomist and anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Edenkoben
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 1948
Place of death New York City