Hugo Obermaier

Hugo Obermaier (29 January 1877, in Regensburg – 12 November 1946, in Fribourg) was a distinguished Spanish-German prehistorian and anthropologist who taught at various European centres of learning.

He is particularly associated with his work on the diffusion of mankind in Europe during the Ice Age, and in connection with north Spanish cave art, and resisted placing his science at the disposal of nationalistic and racialist interests in the Germany of the 1930s.

In 1900 he was ordained as a diocesan priest and between 1901 and 1904 he studied in Vienna the subjects of Prehistoric archaeology, physical geography, geology, palaeontology, ethnology, German philology and human anatomy.

Scientific, personal and political considerations were the cause for his refusal to go back to Germany when, in 1933, he declined the invitation to take up the Max Ebert Chair in Berlin.

In order to pay respect to his memory and equally to advance scientific investigations into the Palaeolithic, on 23 June 1951 archaeologists, geologists, palaeontologists and anthropologists formed a society led by Lothar Zotz.