Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Earnest Hooton of Harvard University, thought their approach would
complement archaeological approaches to this question. It would
necessitate an extensive study of thousands of skeletons from tribes across
the continents in order to understand their variation and work out their
affinities.
As a result, museums and universities rushed to build large research
collections of representative skeletons from all races, in order to measure
and determine their racial origins (38).
And so Hrdlička acquired and examined the Munsee skeletons. He
created table after table of measurements and classifications—noting the
degree of pronouncement of the nasion depression (the depression at the
ridge of the nose), the shape of the palate, the length of the humeri (upper
arm bone), the bicondylar length of the femur. He painstakingly compared
these observations to those of “Negros,” “whites,” and “Indians” of other
tribes. He concluded that the Munsee remains were indeed the same race as
other Lenape and Eastern tribes, but that the few brachycephalic individuals
had likely married into the community from another tribe, possibly the
Shawnee. He also noted quite definitely, without any reference to the
evidence upon which he based his conclusion, that one individual in the
cemetery was a white European.
Physical Anthropology of the Lenape or Delawares is a typical example
of the research Hrdlička and other physical anthropologists conducted on
thousands of skeletons across North, Central, and South America, trying to
understand the origins of Native Americans (39).
The cranial studies from Hrdlička and other physical anthropologists as
well as studies of contemporary Native American phenotypic variation
(hair, skin, eye color) connected them generally with Asian populations.
Hrdlička’s studies of tooth morphology revealed a particular trait, a
“shovel” shape of the incisors, which Native Americans share with East
Asians. Later studies conducted by dental anthropologists linked Native
Americans more specifically to Northeast Asians, with whom they share a
high frequency of certain dental traits (40).
In a 1916 paper (41), Hrdlička summarized the state of physical
anthropological investigations into Native American diversity and laid out
an argument for their origins based on biological data: