The history of anthropometry includes its use as an early tool of anthropology, use for identification, use for the purposes of understanding human physical variation in paleoanthropology and in various attempts to correlate physical with racial and psychological traits. At various points in history, certain anthropometrics have been cited by advocates of discrimination and eugenics often as a part of some social movement or through pseudoscientific claims.
Craniometry and paleoanthropology
In 1716 Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, who wrote many essays on comparative anatomy for the Académie française, published his Memoir on the Different Positions of the Occipital Foramen in Man and Animals (Mémoire sur les différences de la situation du grand trou occipital dans l'homme et dans les animaux). Six years later Pieter Camper (1722–1789), distinguished both as an artist and as an anatomist, published some lectures that laid the foundation of much work. Camper invented the "facial angle," a measure meant to determine intelligence among various species. According to this technique, a "facial angle" was formed by drawing two lines: one horizontally from the nostril to the ear; and the other perpendicularly from the advancing part of the upper jawbone to the most prominent part of the forehead. Camper's measurements of facial angle were first made to compare the skulls of men with those of other animals. Camper claimed that antique statues presented an angle of 90°, Europeans of 80°, Central Africans of 70° and the orangutan of 58°.
Swedish professor of anatomy Anders Retzius (1796–1860) first used the cephalic index in physical anthropology to classify ancient human remains found in Europe. He classed skulls in three main categories; "dolichocephalic" (from the Ancient Greek kephalê "head", and dolikhos "long and thin"), "brachycephalic" (short and broad) and "mesocephalic" (intermediate length and width). Scientific research was continued by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) and Paul Broca (1824–1880), founder of the Anthropological Society in France in 1859. Paleoanthropologists still rely upon craniofacial anthropometry to identify species in the study of fossilized hominid bones. Specimens of Homo erectus and athletic specimens of Homo sapiens, for example, are virtually identical from the neck down but their skulls can easily be told apart.
Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), whose two major monographs were the Crania Americana (1839), An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844) concluded that the ancient Egyptians were not Negroid but Caucasoid and that Caucasians and Negroes were already distinct three thousand years ago. Since The Bible indicated that Noah's Ark had washed up on Mount Ararat only a thousand years before this Noah's sons could not account for every race on earth. According to Morton's theory of polygenism the races had been separate from the start.David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity, 2001, pp. 38–41 Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon carried Morton's ideas further.Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind (1854) Charles Darwin, who thought the single-origin hypothesis essential to evolutionary theory, opposed Nott and Gliddon in his 1871 The Descent of Man, arguing for monogenism.
In 1856, workers found in a limestone quarry the skull of a Neanderthal hominid male, thinking it to be the remains of a bear. They gave the material to amateur naturalist Johann Karl Fuhlrott who turned the fossils over to anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen. The discovery was jointly announced in 1857, giving rise to the discipline of paleoanthropology. By comparing skeletons of apes to man, T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) backed up Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, first expressed in On the Origin of Species (1859). He also developed the "Pithecometra principle," which stated that man and ape were descended from a common ancestor.
Eugène Dubois' (1858–1940) discovery in 1891 in Indonesia of the "Java Man", the first specimen of Homo erectus to be discovered, demonstrated mankind's deep ancestry outside Europe. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) became famous for his "recapitulation theory", according to which each individual mirrors the evolution of the whole species during his life.
Typology and personality
Intelligence testing was compared with anthropometrics. Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) collected hundreds of human skulls from all over the world and started trying to find a way to classify them according to some logical criterion. Morton claimed that he could judge intellectual capacity by cranial capacity. A large skull meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity; a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity. Modern science has since confirmed that there is a correlation between cranium size (measured in various ways) and intelligence as measured by IQ tests, although it is a weak correlation at about 0.2. Today, brain volume as measured with MRI scanners also find a correlation between brain size and intelligence at about 0.4.
Craniometry was also used in phrenology, which purported to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head. At the turn of the 19th century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1822) developed "cranioscopy" (Ancient Greek kranion "skull", scopos "vision"), a method to determine the personality and development of mental and moral faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull. Cranioscopy was later renamed phrenology (phrenos: mind, logos: study) by his student Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832), who wrote extensively on "Drs. Gall and Spurzheim's physiognomical System." These all claimed the ability to predict traits or intelligence and were intensively practised in the 19th and the first part of the 20th century.
During the 1940s anthropometry was used by William Sheldon when evaluating his somatotypes, according to which characteristics of the body can be translated into characteristics of the mind. Inspired by Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropology, he also believed that criminality could be predicted according to the body type. A basically anthropometric division of body types into the categories endomorphic, ectomorphic and mesomorphic derived from Sheldon's somatotype theories is today popular among people doing weight training.
Forensic anthropometry
Bertillon, Galton and criminology
In 1883, Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system of identification that was named after him. The "Bertillonage" system was based on the finding that several measures of physical features, such as the dimensions of bony structures in the body, remain fairly constant throughout adult life. Bertillon concluded that when these measurements were made and recorded systematically, every individual would be distinguishable. This cites as authorities: Lombroso, Antropometria di 400 delinquenti (1872) Roberts, Manual of Anthropometry (1878) Ferri, Studi comparati di antropometria (2 vols., 1881–1882) Lombroso, Rughe anomale speciali ai criminali (1890) Bertillon, Instructions signalétiques pour l'identification anthropométrique (1893) Livi, Anthropometria (Milan, 1900) Fürst, Indextabellen zum anthropometrischen Gebrauch (Jena, 1902) Report of Home Office Committee on the Best Means of Identifying Habitual Criminals (1893–1894) Bertillon's goal was a way of identifying recidivists ("repeat offenders"). Previously police could only record general descriptions. Photography of criminals had become commonplace, but there was no easy way to sort the many thousands of photographs except by name. Bertillon's hope was that, through the use of measurements, a set of identifying numbers could be entered into a filing system installed in a single cabinet.
The system involved 10 measurements; height, stretch (distance from left shoulder to middle finger of raised right arm), bust (torso from head to seat when seated), head length (crown to forehead) and head width temple to temple) width of cheeks, and "lengths" of the right ear, the left foot, middle finger, and cubit (elbow to tip of middle finger). It was possible, by exhaustion, to sort the cards on which these details were recorded (together with a photograph) until a small number produced the measurements of the individual sought, independently of name.
The system was soon adapted to police methods: it prevented impersonation and could demonstrate wrongdoing.
Bertillonage was before long represented in Paris by a collection of some 100,000 cards and became popular in several other countries' justice systems. England followed suit when in 1894, a committee sent to Paris to investigate the methods and its results reported favorably on the use of measurements for primary classification and recommended also the partial adoption of the system of finger prints suggested by Francis Galton, then in use in Bengal, where measurements were abandoned in 1897 after the fingerprint system was adopted throughout British India. Three years later England followed suit, and, as the result of a fresh inquiry ordered by the Home Office, relied upon fingerprints alone.
Bertillonage exhibited certain defects and was gradually supplanted by the system of fingerprints and, latterly, genetics. Bertillon originally measured variables he thought were independent – such as forearm length and leg length – but Galton had realized that both were the result of a single causal variable (in this case, stature) and developed the statistical concept of correlation.
Other complications were: it was difficult to tell whether or not individuals arrested were first-time offenders; instruments employed were costly and liable to break down; skilled measurers were needed; errors were frequent and all but irremediable; and it was necessary to repeat measurements three times to arrive at a mean result.
Physiognomy
Physiognomy claimed a correlation between physical features (especially facial features) and character traits. It was made famous by Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), the founder of anthropological criminology, who claimed to be able to scientifically identify links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. The originator of the concept of a "born criminal" and arguing in favor of biological determinism, Lombroso tried to recognize criminals by measurements of their bodies. He concluded that skull and facial features were clues to genetic criminality and that these features could be measured with craniometers and calipers with the results developed into quantitative research. A few of the 14 identified traits of a criminal included large jaws, forward projection of jaw, low sloping forehead; high cheekbones, flattened or upturned nose; handle-shaped ears; hawk-like noses or fleshy lips; hard shifty eyes; scanty beard or baldness; insensitivity to pain; long arms, and so on.
Phylogeography, race and human origins