Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

as systematically biased, most famously by the late paleontologist
Steven J. Gould in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man (W.W.
Norton & Company, 1981). Others have critiqued Gould’s critique. But
most experts I’ve talked to on the subject who have actually worked
with the Morton collection believe that his analyses were indeed
significantly biased to inflate the average size of European crania and
depress the calculated average size for all other races. In “The Fault in
His Seeds: Lost Notes to the Case of Bias in Samuel George Morton’s
Cranial Race Science” (PLOS Biology 16, no. 10 (2018): e2007008,
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2007008), Paul Wolff Mitchell
argues that Gould’s accusation of bias in Morton’s data was wrong, but
that Gould was correct about Morton’s perspectives, intentions, and use
of his data to promote racist ends.
27. Samuel George Morton, Crania Americana, or, A Comparative View of
the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (J.
Dobson, 1839).
28. In this book I focus my very brief survey on the history of physical
anthropology in the United States, but the reader should understand that
there are strong traditions of physical anthropology in other countries
across the world.The terms physical anthropology and biological
anthropology are often used synonymously. However, the term
biological anthropology is increasingly favored by researchers in the
United States to reflect a break from its more typological past and a
focus on, as Agustín Fuentes notes in a 2021 article, “the human
experience in the broader ecological, evolutionary, and phylogenetic
context” (see “Biological Anthropology’s Critical Engagement with
Genomic Evolution, Race/Racism, and Ourselves: Opportunities and
Challenges to Making a Difference in the Academy and the World,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175, no. 2 (2021): 326–
338). Throughout this book, I will refer to the field as physical
anthropology when discussing its early history, and biological
anthropology for more recent events, reflecting the discipline’s
evolution.
29. Blakey, “Intrinsic Social and Political Bias”; Michael L. Blakey,
“Understanding Racism in Physical (Biological) Anthropology,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology,