Science relies on past discoveries,
and research is always building
on the work of previous generations.
But in many cases,
those discoveries were made
by people who weren't perfect,
to put it mildly.
A lot of fields are grappling
with the ethical dilemmas created
by earlier researchers.
But the field of forensic anthropology
has more reckoning to do than most,
thanks to its founder.
We’re talking about a man
named Aleš Hrdlička.
And while he may have been a
renowned researcher, trained doctor,
and even an FBI consultant,
he was also a racist graverobber
who turned out to be wrong
about almost everything.
His legacy is deeply tainted
with the moral failings of how he obtained
the data used to make his largest claims.
So today,
what he got very wrong,
and how the field he helped found is now trying to undo the biases of its history.
[intro]
First up, a content warning:
This video will include discussions
of racist language and historical events
of violence against people of color.
Aleš Hrdlička began his career
as a physician in the 1890s,
and even at the start,
he had an obsession
with categorizing people into groups,
and more to the point,
ranking those groups
in terms of superiority.
Since he was a white, able-bodied man
in the 1800’s,
I’m sure you can guess which group
he thought was at the top of the heap.
During an internship at a mental hospital,
he became interested
in measuring people
in as much detail as possible.
This was the 19th-century pseudoscience
of anthropometry.
Hrdlička was one of many researchers
attempting to use anthropometry
to find physical differences
between people of different races
as a way of explaining assumed differences
in intelligence, criminality, physical fitness, and more.
And he was so passionate about this research that in 1895,
Hrdlička officially left medicine
to become a physical anthropologist.
To Hrdlička and his contemporaries,
physical anthropology meant
the study of “man’s” variation
through measurement,
categorization, and debate.
Hrdlička came to anthropology
through medicine,
so his early research
focused on measurements of people
with medical conditions.
For example,
one of his earliest papers
included measurements
from a thousand people,
grouped by sex
and, quote, “form of insanity.”
But he also wanted measurements
of all kinds of people for comparison,
so by the late 1890s,
he turned to his colleagues
for help acquiring specimens.
Which meant cadavers,
skeletons, and body parts.
And these letters asking for spare skeletons
were not seen as red flags at the time.
Back then,
It was just accepted
that researchers needed research objects ….
Including human remains.
Hrdlička’s collection
actually helped build his reputation
as a dedicated anthropologist.
In 1899,
he joined an expedition
to the southwestern United States
led by the American Museum of Natural History,
and also worked closely
with the US National Museum,
which is now known as
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
He climbed the ranks at the US National Museum
and became their first curator
of the Division of Physical Anthropology
in 1910.
And he traveled all over the world,
taking photographs, measurements,
and collecting human remains
in the name of building the anthropological collection
at the museum for research.
And his work was revolutionary at the time.
For instance,
he made several trips to Alaska and Siberia
between 1926 and his death in 1943,
which led him to theorize that humans migrated
from Asia to North America
over the Bering Strait.
Which is still the leading theory
for how people first reached North America.
And, his skills at analyzing human remains
had more uses than just pure academics.
He consulted with the FBI
to help identify human remains in homicide cases,
and the techniques he used
to identify unknown remains
formed the basis of what’s now forensic anthropology.
In 1918,
he founded
the American Journal of Physical Anthropology,
and in 1928, he served as President of the
Washington Academy of Sciences
and helped found
the American Association
of Physical Anthropologists.
Which is all to say,
he wasn’t a fringe figure
in 19th and early 20th-century science.
He was well established and highly respected.
But when anthropologists look back on his work today,
they see things very differently.
Hrdlička’s work
was based on deeply flawed assumptions
and the dehumanization
of the people he studied.
Consider his career at the National Museum.
When he arrived,
the museum had a collection
of about 2,200 skulls.
By the end of his career,
the museum had amassed
more than 30,000 bones
and body parts
from about 10,000 individuals.
And that raises a lot of questions, like:
How?
And why?
Well, museums
have a lot more going on
than the exhibits that the public can visit.
Behind the scenes,
they have warehouses
full of specimens collected
over decades of research.
Traveling to European and American colonies,
collecting examples of
wildlife, plants, rocks and minerals,
and shipping them to Western universities
and museums
was really common
in 19th-century science.
Like, Charles Darwin’s
trip aboard the H.M.S.
Beagle
in the 1830s collected specimens
of 1,500 species,
and many of those hadn’t
been seen in Europe before.
But Hrdlička, like others before him,
ains, and his methods were horrifying.
On Kodiak Island in Alaska,
he paid children
in the Alutiiq community 10 cents
if they brought him human bones.
And over several trips to the area,
he and a small team dug up about 1,000 graves
to send the remains
to the Smithsonian.
In Peru,
he collected more than 3,000 skulls using similar methods.
And in northern Mexico,
he went to the site
of a government massacre of Yaqui people
and decapitated
several bodies with a machete.
He sent 12 skulls and other remains
from the site to a museum
in New York in 1902.
And what did Hrdlička
want to do with this collection?
Well here’s what he wrote in 1918,
in Volume 1, Issue 1
of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology:
“The paramount scientific object of Physical Anthropology
is the gradual completion…
of the study of the normal white man
living under ordinary conditions.”
Then,
after understanding non-human primates
and human evolution,
Hrdlička’s fourth priority for physical anthropology
was “the continuous advance in the study
of the more primitive human races
and their subdivisions.”
So…
There's a lot to unpack there.
Hrdlička started with the assumption
that there were three
biologically separate human races,
which he called white, black,
and yellowbrown.
He thought everyone on Earth
could be categorized into those three races.
And he assumed
that those races existed in a hierarchy
with white people at the top
as the healthiest and most “civilized” group.
So if he found some measurement
that was different in white people
compared to other groups,
he would conclude
that it was a physical sign of superiority.
Then he would claim that people
with that physical measurement
were destined for higher intelligence
or better health than other people.
Or on the flip side,
he claimed that people
with, say, darker skin,
were biologically destined for worse outcomes.
That’s That whole idea is called biological determinism,
and it is, of course, bogus.
Oddly enough,
he actually opposed
the use of statistical analysis
in physical anthropology,
so his observations
were basically just raw data,
and parsing what they meant
was pretty subjective.
Plus, he held some wildly inaccurate ideas
about how our species evolved.
Despite fossil evidence to the contrary,
he was adamant that humans evolved
from European fossil ancestors
and that the evidence
coming from Asia and Africa
had no bearing on our evolution.
Hrdlička had critics in his day–
and not just the people
who actually wanted to
use statistics in their science.
Franz Boas,
another prominent 20th-century anthropologist,
held views that were almost
completely opposite Hrdlička’s.
His research on immigrants to the United States
and their children
began to show that the environment
played a huge role
in a person’s appearance and health.
Now to be clear,
Boas wasn’t exactly perfect.
His work mostly focused
on white people in America
and like Hrdlička,
understanding other cultures
was further down on his priority list.
But Boas’ rejection of biological race
was relatively new and unusual
in anthropology at the time.
And, socially and culturally,
race remained a major force
in the lives of Americans.
So when politicians had questions about race,
they didn’t go to the guy who said race isn’t real.
They went to the guy with a reputation
as an expert in racial difference:
Ales Hrdlička.
Not only did he traumatize Indigenous communities
and set physical anthropology
on a path full of bias and blind spots,
Hrdlička also had a say in U.S. federal policy
on immigration
and even interracial marriage.
So it’s fair to say that Hrdlička
cast a long, dark shadow
on the science of anthropology
Anthropologists have reckoned
with his legacy for decades,
and especially in the last few years,
they’ve taken action to address it.
For one thing,
the term physical anthropology
is almost entirely defunct,
because it’s so closely tied
to the flawed idea of quantifying racial difference.
Today,
anthropologists who study human evolution
make use of way more information
than just the dimensions of the body.
They take into account
genetics, nutrition, environmental science,
infectious disease, behavior,
and they definitely use statistics
to analyze all that data.
In 2022,
the organization that Hrdlička
founded changed its name to
the American Association of Biological Anthropology.
And meanwhile,
institutions like
the Smithsonian Natural History Museum
have a new openness to repatriation,
meaning returning the human remains
in their collections to their communities.
Federal law in the U.S.
requires that museums inform
Native American, Alaska Native
and Native Hawaiian communities
about the human remains in their collections
that could be repatriated.
So in the last 30 years,
the Smithsonian
has returned 4,068 sets of remains,
including 4 brains.
About 2,000 more sets of remains
are in the process of being returned.
But the law doesn’t cover
returning remains to communities
outside the US, like the Mexican
or Peruvian remains that Hrdlička collected.
And while many say
they will return remains upon request,
Often these communities have no idea
that they even exist.
So thousands of human remains,
including over 250 brains,
are still held by the Smithsonian.
And to make matters even more complicated,
the Smithsonian collection of human remains
has been really important
in the development of forensic anthropology.
Identifying people by their remains is a necessary skill after tragedies
where they are otherwise unrecognizable.
That could be when a person goes missing
and their body is found far too late,
or after a mass casualty event
like an earthquake or terrorist attack.
Forensic anthropologists’ work
can even provide new insights
into the historical events
that led to the creation
of these unethical collections.
Modern forensic analysis
of the 12 skulls that Hrdlička
collected in Mexico
revealed the brutality of the massacre,
and the remains were
repatriated, baptized, and buried
with a warriors’ honor guard in 2009.
Forensic anthropology
is still criticized for its reliance on race and ancestry.
Some in the field are pushing for new methods
that take a more nuanced view of variation
between populations.
They say that the Hrdličkian view of ancestry is too rigid –
but it has been tough to shake off entirely.
And that speaks to the size
of his impact on anthropology.
He founded this entire subfield,
and that’s not something we can ignore.
Instead,
today’s biological anthropologists
are doing the hard work
of facing Hrdlička’s legacy head on.
And that means acknowledging
his many, many flaws,
and the ways they’re embedded in the field,
and then finding ways to move forward.
Like by making room for more people of all backgrounds
to become biological anthropologists,
and sharing cultural perspectives
that often go unrecognized.
Because if we want to understand ourselves
as a species,
our research will be stronger if
we all have a seat at the table.
So…
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