Harvard
Washburn entered Harvard's graduate program with the intention of pursuing a doctorate in zoology. His 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. Finding the mixture of archaeology, customs and human evolution stimulating, he joined the physical anthropology program led by Earnest Hooton where he was able to enfold his zoological coursework such as comparative anatomy and paleontology in his approach to the study of human evolution. Doctoral students in Harvard's physical anthropology program were forced to look beyond the anthropology department to secure the necessary training, which 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.
While studying for his doctorate, Washburn received his first opportunity to engage in fieldwork. He served as an assistant zoologist in Harold J. Coolidge's 1935–36 Asiatic Primate Expedition. In Malaysia he helped collect specimens of various species of colobine and macaque monkeys and the orangutan. In Sri Lanka and Thailand he also collected specimens of lar gibbon and observed their behavior in natural surroundings. He continued this work on the collection when he returned to Harvard, at times assisted by Gabriel Lasker. Washburn would later credit the ongoing discussions between Lasker and himself during this period (1938) as formative to his views about human variability. To Washburn, human variability was to be understood in terms of population genetics, and not according to the terms of racial and constitutional typology as typified by his doctoral advisor, Hooton.
His doctoral thesis was a metrical appraisal of proportions in the skeletons of adult macaques and langurs. His doctorate, awarded in 1940, was the first from Harvard's anthropology department to be awarded for a study of non-human primates.
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