Sherwood L. Washburn (1911-2000)
Born in Massachusetts, Washburn earned his B. A. and Ph. D. in anthropology at Harvard in 1935 and 1940. He began his career at Chicago in 1947; in 1958 he came to the University at McCown’s invitation. He retired in 1978. Washburn was instrumental in shifting the focus of physical anthropology from a preoccupation with typology of racial types to an evolutional adaptive approach to documenting and understanding human physical variation and behavior. He demonstrated the importance of primate behavior studies to anthropology.