Luschan was born the son of a lawyer in
Hollabrunn,
Lower Austria, and attended the
Akademisches Gymnasium in
Vienna. After leaving school he studied medicine at the
University of Vienna and anthropology in
Paris, with an emphasis on
craniometry. After he gained his doctorate in 1878, he was an army doctor in Austro-Hungarian occupied
Bosnia and, together with the British archaeologist
Arthur Evans, travelled through
Dalmatia,
Montenegro and
Albania. From 1880 he worked as a medical assistant at the
Vienna General Hospital and a lecturer (
Privatdozent) at the University of Vienna in 1882. In 1885 he married Emma von Hochstetter, daughter of the German geologist
Ferdinand von Hochstetter, a close friend of his father. On 1 January 1886 Luschan took up a position as an assistant to Director
Adolf Bastian at the
Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in
Berlin (the present-day
Ethnological Museum), where, upon Bastian's death in 1905, he became Director of the Africa and Oceania Department. In this capacity he acquired one of the most important collections of
Benin antiquities,
ivory carvings, and
bronze figures, details of which he published in his multivolume
magnum opus. He also lead a huge collection campaign of the bones and skulls of thousands of people from across European empires. In 1906, this included human remains from the
Herero-Nama Genocide. in the
Von Luschan's chromatic scale for classifying skin color. It was reported that for areas with no data Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas. He started his academic career in 1888, in 1904 was appointed
Reader, and in 1909 gave up his duties at the
Völkerkundemuseum when he was appointed tenured professor at the Berlin
Charité medical school. In 1911 he became the holder of the first chair of anthropology at Berlin's
Frederick William University (now the Humboldt University of Berlin). He is also remembered for creating the
von Luschan's chromatic scale for classifying
skin colour, which consisted of 36 opaque glass tiles which were compared to the subject's skin. Though Luschan had joined the
German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1908, in his works he rejected the rising ideas of "
scientific racism" and stressed the equality of the human races. He argued for his position in parts on the basis of skulls he instructed German colonial troops to acquire in German colonies, including human remains of victims of the Herero-Nama Genocide. He died in Berlin at the age of 69 and is buried at his summer residence in
Millstatt, Austria. The German Society for Racial Hygiene goal was "for society to return to a healthy and blooming, strong and beautiful life" as Ploetz put it. The Nordic race was supposed to regain its "purity" through selective reproduction and sterilization. In 1915 he was appointed to the "Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission" (Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission) for his anthropological expertise. The purpose of the commission was to record the approximately 250 languages spoken by the prisoners of German WWI PoW camps. In the course of this endeavor, von Luschan also conducted
physical anthropology research on the internees. ==Expeditions==