Famous German Anthropologists

Rudolf Virchow was a German physician, pathologist, anthropologist, biologist, prehistorian, editor, writer, and politician. Nicknamed the Pope of medicine by his colleagues, Virchow is credited with founding the field of social medicine. He is also widely regarded as the father of modern pathology.  Rudolf Virchow was the first person to name diseases, such as thrombosis, leukemia, ochronosis, embolism, and chordoma.

A pioneer of physical anthropology, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach laid down one of the first racial classification systems for humans after studying human skulls, dividing mankind into five racial groups. Born into a family of academics, he was a prodigy. He was against scientific racism, though his theory promoted the degenerative hypothesis.

Max Scheler was a German philosopher best known for his work in ethics, phenomenology, and philosophical anthropology. He developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. He had a deep influence on the theology of Pope John Paul II. For many years, Scheler taught philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne.  

Franz Weidenreich was a German physical anthropologist and anatomist. Weidenreich, who studied evolution, is credited with pioneering the multiregional hypothesis which provides a different explanation to the standardized recent African origin model (RAO) of monogenesis. The Weidenreich Theory was supported by several anthropologists, including Carleton S. Coon.

German anthropologist and historical-geographer Berthold Laufer who virtually remained the only sinologist working in the US for over three-decades, made significant contributions in shedding light on the attributes of the Chinese and Tibetan culture. He served as the curator of Asiatic Ethnology and Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, and made major contributions to its collections.