Washburn, Sherwood L.

Washburn, Sherwood L. (Larned) (1911–  ) physical anthropologist; born in Cambridge, Mass. Educated at Harvard, he later taught at Columbia University (1939–47), the University of Chicago (1947–58), and the University of California: Berkeley (1958–79). A leading authority on primate and human evolution, he stressed the importance of field studies for modeling the behavior of extinct hominids. He edited Social Life of Early Man (1962), and published several books on human evolution.