#craniometry

[ancientstuff]

How the racist study of skulls gripped Victorian Britain's scientists

The recent publication of the University of Edinburgh's Review of Race and History has drawn attention to its "skull room": a collection of

Petrie was deeply interested and believed in eugenics, of which this is a tangential arm. His infamous 'New Race' at Naqada was part of that.

[forensicfield]

Personal Identification Technique and their Importance in determination of Age and Sex

The metric (anthropometry) and morphological (Anthroposcopy) assessment of the characteristics of living and skeletal remains are two of the most often used methods in forensic anthropology. These methods date back to the seventeenth century, Read More...

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[freiherr65]

Skull measuring

Craniometry is measurement of the cranium (the main part of the skull), usually the human cranium. It is a subset of cephalometry, measurement of the head, which in humans is a subset of anthropometry, measurement of the human body. It is distinct from phrenology

[madeoutofwords]

Glabella

From glabellus (latin)

Noun (anatomy)

1. smooth elevation of the frontal bone just above the bridge of the nose used as a reference point in physical anthropology or craniometry

Synonims: mesophyron

[thesociologicalcinema]

In this image a man measures children’s skulls along the shores of the Zuiderzee and on the Frisian Islands in the Netherlands, 1912. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists were taking skull measurements all over the world in an effort to develop the science of craniometry. Among other claims, enthusiasts of this pseudoscience claimed to be able to measure intelligence based on skull characteristics and spread the false idea that the biological basis for race could be detected in the measurements of the skull. — in Urk.

[womanandserpent-blog]

A human skull and measurement device from 1902.

[squirrelingbeaver]

Stephen Jay Gould on Samuel George Morton’s Craniometry

During the summer of 1977 I spent several weeks reanalyzing Morton’s data. (Morton, the self-styled objectivist, published all his raw information. We can infer with little doubt how he moved from raw measurements to summary tables.) In short, and to put it bluntly, Morton’s summaries are a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions. Yet - and this is the most intriguing aspect of the case - I find no evidence of conscious fraud; indeed, had Morton been a conscious fudger, he would not have published his data so openly. 

Conscious fraud is probably rare in science. It is also not very interesting, for it tells us little about the nature of scientific activity. Liars, if discovered, are excommunicated; scientists declare that their profession has properly policed itself, and they return to work, mythology unimpaired, and objectively vindicated. The prevalence of unconscious finagling, on the other hand, suggests a general conclusion about the social context of science. For if scientists can be honestly self-deluded to Morton’s extent, then prior prejudice may be found anywhere, even in the basics of measuring bones and toting sums. 

[...] Morton’s finagling may be ordered into four general categories:

1. Favourable inconsistencies and shifting criteria: Morton often chose to include or delete large subsamples in order to match group averages with prior expectations. He included Inca Peruvians to decrease the Indian average, but deleted Hindus to raise the Caucasian mean. He also chose to present or not to calculate the averages of subsamples in striking accord with desired results. He made calculations for Caucasians to demonstrate the superiority of Teutons and Anglo-Saxons, but never presented data for Indian subsamples with equally high averages. 

2. Subjectivity directed toward prior prejudice: Morton’s measures with seed were sufficiently imprecise to permit a wide range of influence by subjective bias; later measures with shot, on the other hand, were repeatable, and presumably objective. In skulls measured by both methods, values for shot always exceed values for the light, poorly packing seed. But degrees of discrepancy match a priori assumptions: an average of 5.4, 2.2, and 1.8 cubic inches for blacks, Indians, and whites, respectively. In other words, blacks fared poorest and whites best when the results could be biased toward an unexpected result. 

3. Procedural omissions that seem obvious to us: Morton was convinced that variation in skull size recorded differential, innate mental ability. He never considered alternate hyptheses, though his own data almost cried out for a different interpretation. Morton never computed means by sex or stature, even when he recorded these data in his tabulations - as for Egyptian mummies. Had he computed the effect of stature, he would presumably have recognized that it explained all important differences in brain size among his groups. Negroids yielded a lower average than Caucasians among his Egyptian skulls because the negroid sample probably contained a higher percentage of smaller-statured females, not because blacks are innately stupider. The Incas that he included in the Indian sample and the Hindus that he excluded from the Caucasian sample both possessed small brains as a consequence of small body size. Morton used an all-female sample of three Hottentots to support the stupidity of blacks, and an all-male sample of Englishmen to assert the superiority of whites.

4. Miscalculations and convenient omissions: All miscalculations and omissions that I have detected are in Morton’s favor. He rounded the negroid Egyptian average down to 79, rather than up to 80. He cited averages of 90 for Germans and Anglo-Saxons, but the correct values are 88 and 89. He excluded a large Chinese skull and an Eskimo subsample from his final tabulation for mongoloids, thus depressing their average below the Caucasian value. 

Yet through all this juggling, I detected no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation. Morton made no attempt to cover his tracks and I presume that he was unaware that he had left them. He explained all his procedures and published all his raw data. All I can discern is an a priori conviction about racial ranking so powerful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines. Yet, Morton was widely hailed as the objectivist of his age, the man who would rescue American science from the mire of supported speculation. 

Source: Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York : W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 99-111. 

[inbonobo]

It's not clear why—medicine? cars? supermarkets?—but the skulls of white Americans, and perhaps of other races and nationalities, have become slightly taller and roomier, according to new forensic research.

Americans' Heads Getting Bigger

New measurements of hundreds of skulls of white Americans born between 1825 and the 1985 suggest that their typical noggin height has grown by about a third of an inch (eight millimeters).

Beginning with the dawn of the first Homo species, human skulls evolved to be increasingly bigger until about 30,000 years ago, when head size plateaued. And about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, when agriculture took off in earnest, skulls began shrinking. The cause of the shrinkage is a mystery, but scientists have tentatively fingered more efficient brain wiring and easier access to food and safety—the idea being that people no longer had to be especially smart to survive (aka the Idiocracy theory).