Hugo Obermaier

Hugo Obermaier (29 January 1877, Regensburg – 12 November 1946, Fribourg) was a distinguished 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.

Hugo Obermaier spent his childhood and the early part of his student years in Regensburg. In 1900 he was ordained as a lay 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. Among his teachers at this time the most important were Albrecht Penck, Josef Szombathy and Moritz Hoernes. In 1904 he gained a doctorate with a dissertation on The Diffusion of Humankind during the Ice Age in Middle Europe. Only four years later he qualified as a lecturer and in 1909, despite opposition from Albrecht Penck, his former teacher, he became an unsalaried university lecturer in Vienna. In 1911 he took up a professorial post at the newly founded Institute of Human Palaeontology in Paris, which he held until the outbreak of the First World War. In that period he was working with Wernert and Henri Breuil at the caves of El Castillo and the Cueva de La Pasiega in Cantabria. While in Spain (1914) he next decided to work at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, but changing again in 1922 to a professorship at the Complutense University in Madrid. He dug at the Cave of Altamira in 1924-5, and collaborated with Breuil in their publication in 1935. His work with Frobenius included the study of the Neolithic rock engravings of south Oran in 1925.

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