Wu Xinzhi

In this Chinese name, the family name is Wu.

Wu Xinzhi
吴新智
Born	(1928-06-02)2 June 1928 Hefei, Anhui, China
Died	4 December 2021(2021-12-04) (aged 93) Beijing, China
Alma mater	Shanghai Medical College
Scientific career
Fields	Paleoanthropology
Institutions	Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology
Chinese name
Simplified Chinese	吴新智
Traditional Chinese	呉新智
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Wú Xīnzhì

Wu Xinzhi (Chinese: 吴新智; 2 June 1928 – 4 December 2021) was a Chinese paleoanthropologist, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and former vice director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP).

Biography

Wu was born in Hefei, Anhui, China, in 1928. He graduated with a B.S. in medicine from Shanghai Medical College in 1953, and taught from 1953 to 1958 at the Department of Anatomy, Dalian Medical College. He then attended the graduate school of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After graduating in 1961, he became an assistant research professor, and later vice director, of the IVPP. During the 1980s he was chief editor of the journal Acta Anthropologica Sinica. He was elected an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999. In 2013 he was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award in Anthropology. On 5 December 2021, he died of an illness in Beijing, aged 93.

Views on human evolution

Wu is most known for his criticism of the Out of Africa hypothesis. Along with Milford H. Wolpoff and Alan Thorne he developed the alternative Multiregional hypothesis in 1984. Wu however confines his palaeoanthropological research to China and coined "Continuity with Hybridization" to refer to a China-specific Multiregional model (Wu, 1998). According to Wu, the human lineage arose in Africa sometime during the early Pleistocene and since then, evolution has been within a single, continuous species. He considers H. erectus for example to be the earliest fossil specimens of the species Homo sapiens, against the more popular view that Homo sapiens arose as a species 200,000 years ago in Africa. Wu argues that while there were migrations outside of Africa within the last 100,000 years, these did not replace the human population already settled in China. He claims there is evidence of regional continuity in China in terms of Mongoloid cranial morphology, but that there was always gene flow between the indigenous occupants and African migrants.