1. Sherwood Washburn changed the field of anthropology with the publication of his paper The New Physical Anthropology, in 1951, in which he argued, convincingly, that human variation was continuous, and could not be broken up into discontinuous races.
Sherwood Washburn was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Henry Bradford Washburn Sr.
Sherwood Washburn was the younger brother of Henry Bradford Washburn.
Sherwood Washburn entered Harvard's graduate program with the intention of pursuing a doctorate in zoology.
Sherwood Washburn's focus shifted to anthropology after being induced to attend an introductory seminar on the subject led by his freshman advisor and close family friend Alfred Tozzer.
Doctoral students in Harvard's physical anthropology program were forced to look beyond the anthropology department to secure the necessary training, which Sherwood Washburn considered fortuitous because the experience left him with deep appreciation how much more can be learned when a multidisciplinary effort is brought into the analysis.
Sherwood Washburn continued this work on the collection when he returned to Harvard, at times assisted by Gabriel Lasker.
Sherwood Washburn's doctoral thesis was a metrical appraisal of proportions in the skeletons of adult macaques and langurs.
Sherwood Washburn's doctorate, awarded in 1940, was the first from Harvard's anthropology department to be awarded for a study of non-human primates.
Sherwood Washburn left the University of Chicago for a professorship in University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 1979.