Sherwood Washburn

Sherwood Larned Washburn ( – ), nicknamed "Sherry", was an American physical anthropologist, and "a legend in the field." He was a pioneer in the field of primatology, opening it to the study of primates in their natural habitats. His research and influence in the comparative analysis of primate behaviors to theories of human origins established a new course of study within the field of human evolution. He changed the field of anthropology with the publication of his paper The New Physical Anthropology, in 1951, in which he argued, convincingly, that human variation was continuous, and could not be broken up into discontinuous races.

His doctoral thesis was a metrical appraisal of proportions in the skeletons of adult macaques and langurs. His doctorate, awarded in 1940, was the first from Harvard's anthropology department to be awarded for a study of non-human primates.

Washburn insisted that proper interpretation of primate anatomy and human behavioral evolution required comparative information from living primates in their natural settings. According to a history of primatology by Shirley C. Strum (a former student of Washburn's ) and Linda Fedigan, Washburn's stance was a crucial influence on post-WWII primate field studies in the United States. Washburn and his students used an evolutionary framework with a straightforward underlying argument: "All primates, whether human or nonhuman, shared certain adaptive features, a 'primate pattern' believed to vary little across contexts and species." However, this belief in a single 'primate pattern' was toppled in the decades that followed, as field researches discovered that primate groups were far more diverse than Washburn and others had assumed.

Published works Social Life of Early Man, New York, Viking Fund, 1961 Evolution of a Teacher Annual Review of Anthropology. 1983. Human evolution: Biosocial perspectives, edited with Elizabeth McCown, Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co. 1978 Ape Into Man; A Study of Human Evolution, Boston: Little, Brown. 1973.