In 1911, he traveled as ship's doctor with
Wilhelm Filchner to Antarctica, but did not participate in the expedition to the
Weddell Sea due to appendicitis. At
South Georgia he cured himself out and met his wife, the daughter of
Carl Anton Larsen, the founder of the whaling station at
Grytviken. During the
First World War, he was a government doctor working in Micronesia. In 1928, he visited South Georgia with his wife and the cameraman
Albert Benitz to lead the first scientific expedition to the island. In 1931, he joined the
Nazi Party, and later undertook, partly on behalf of the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, expeditions to
Tanganyika Territory in search of "primitive man". In 1938/1939, he discovered
Australopithecus afarensis at
Laetoli, without realizing the importance of his find. He also collected folklore of the
Hadza and
Isanzu. He and his wife Margit performed excavations at the
Mumba cave where they found a numerous
Middle Stone Age artifacts. He attempted to prove that all people have a common origin, but that African peoples remained in the state of primitive man, while the
Aryan race had developed. Such 'scholarship' was at odds with most anthropological concerns of the day in Africa. In 1939, Kohl-Larsen became Professor of
Ethnology at the
University of Tübingen. He lost his position in the course of denazification after the war, but worked from 1949 at the Institute of Early History in Tübingen. Due in part to his politics, but also to dubious scholarship, Kohl-Larsen is not highly regarded amongst contemporary East Africanists. == Bibliography==