Georg August Schweinfurth was born on December 29, 1836, in Riga, Latvia.

He was a Baltic German explorer, botanist, geographer, and historian. He dreamed of becoming an explorer, and in 1856, he moved to Germany to study botany and paleontology in Heidelberg (1858-1859; Ph.D., 1862), Munich (1859-1860), and Berlin (1860-1861). He also trained physically, enjoying long walks in the Latvian countryside and hiking in the Alps. In 1863-1866, he studied the flora of Egypt and adjacent regions from the Delta to Khartum and from the Red Sea along the slopes of the Abyssinian highlands to the Blue Nile. The Berlin Academy of Sciences awarded Schweinfurth a grant to explore Central Africa. From 1868 to 1871, he made numerous discoveries not only in the fields of geography and botany but also in ethnography and history. Mapping huge swathes of unexplored territory, he discovered the Uëlle River (1870). In his account of these travels, The Heart of Africa (1873), he depicted the history and present culture of the people he encountered and documented the pygmy tribe of the Acca, confirming what had previously only been a legend. In 1874, he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Settling in Cairo in 1875, he founded, under Ismail Pasha's auspices, a geographical society (Société Khédiviale de Géographie) and devoted himself almost exclusively to African studies, historical and ethnographical. He continued his botanical and geological investigation of the lower Nile valley. In 1889, he moved to Berlin where, except for his visits to Eritrea (1891-1894), he remained. His herbarium was given to the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Museum.

He died on September 19, 1925, in Berlin, Germany.