Sherwood Washburn was a central figure in the revolutionary advance of physical anthropology during the past century. Through his teaching, writings, and conferences, he reformulated our vision of human evolution. Virtually single-handedly, he added anthropology into "the modern synthesis." Global in outlook, multidisciplinary in approach, intuitive in analysis, he invigorated human evolution and broke down boundaries between paleontology, biology, and anatomy, and between social and physical anthropology.
After graduating from Harvard summa cum laude in 1935, he became one of Ernest Hooton's 28 graduate students there, characteristically the only one to study nonhuman primates for his doctoral dissertation (Ph.D., 1940). 1 His interest in natural history had appeared early. As a high school student he kept birds and prepared skeletons at the Harvard Museum. In 1937, as a graduate student he went on the Asiatic Primate Expedition and prepared monkey and ape skeletons as assistant to Adolph Schultz. In a neighboring area, Ray Carpenter carried out the first observations of gibbon behavior. That Bornean field experience gave Washburn what became a lifelong appreciation of animals within an ecological context, a vision he passed on forcefully to his students.
In 1939, Washburn moved to New York to teach anatomy at Columbia University Medical School. During these formative years, the young scholar tapped into the relationship of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History. He undertook laboratory research with experimental embryologist Samuel Detwiler and investigated the relationship between soft tissue and bone. He began immediately to extrapolate from changes in the altered temporal muscle attachments in newborn rats to fossil bones and the forces that shaped them. 2 At the American Museum of Natural History, he came under the influence of William King Gregory, the great comparative anatomist and paleontologist then approaching the end of his long and distinguished career. Washburn often spoke reverently of Gregory and his influence. There was also Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist from Russia who had worked with Thomas Hunt Morgan in the Columbia fruit fly laboratory. Ernst Mayr and