Word: weidenreich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Dr. Franz Weidenreich, 75, famed German-born anthropologist; in Manhattan. His research on Asiatic skull fossils led to a revolutionary theory that modern man was descended from a giant rather than a pygmy predecessor. Aided by discoveries of Dr. Ralph von Koenigswald, he revamped the chronology of human evolution, placed the huge Gigantopithecus (450-550,000 years old) as man's earliest known ancestor...
When TIME reappeared on German newsstands two months ago after seven years' absence, Journalist Peter Weidenreich thought that the blow ought to be softened. A native Berliner who left Germany for the U.S. about the time Hitler's Wehrmacht moved into Austria, became a naturalized American citizen, served with SHAEF's Psychological Warfare Division (as radio commentator and editor of German-language newspapers) in the late war, Weidenreich figured that TIME would be a stiff jolt for Germans accustomed to the controlled misinformation of Herr Gocbbels' press. To help make TIME more intelligible to German readers...
Does a high brow necessarily make its owner a highbrow? Anthropologists have long and solemnly argued the relative braininess of long-headed v. roundheaded men. Now, an anthropologist who deplores the whole argument - Dr. Franz Weidenreich of the American Museum of Natural History-contends that they have been wasting their time. In a well-documented report in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, he offers a convincing case against the prevailing notion that a long head (or a high brow) denotes a superior brain. Intelligence, he concludes flatly, has nothing to do with the shape of the head...
...Weidenreich traces the head-shape fallacy, on which the Nazis based their theory of the superiority of the longheaded Nordic type, to "a tragic anthropological error committed in good faith" 100 years ago by a Swedish anatomist named Anders Retzius. Retzius hit on the idea of identifying peoples or races by a head-measurement index based on the ratio between length (from the forehead to the back of the head) and breadth. Ever since, anthropologists have classified all men as "dolichocephalics" (long-headed), "brachycephalics" (broad-headed) and "mesocephalics" (in between...
Anthropologists by now have measured so many heads that Dr. Weidenreich feels the evidence is clear. The facts: 1) the Asiatics (notably the Mongols), who were supposed to have contaminated European dolichocephalism, had long heads, not round heads; 2) the only predominantly long-headed groups in the world today are savages in Australia and Africa; 3) civilized men of all races are becoming more & more roundheaded, probably as a result of rising from all fours to an erect posture, which changes the form of the spinal column and of the skull base. The trend toward a broader and shorter skull...