In 1619, Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini was burned alive for suggesting that humans evolved from apes. Over two centuries later, popular society still reserved its sharpest contempt for evolutionists. Yet a literal interpretation of Genesis started to unravel long before Darwin published On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man . Europeans were deeply disturbed by the anatomical similarities they saw between themselves and apes, and they struggled to find logical explanations. Some even lumped the Khoisan peoples (called the "Hottentots") of southern Africa into the same group as apes, classifying them as degenerate children of Adam; citing their lack of "perfect reason" and modesty, 17th-century naturalist Edward Topsell argued that "above all they cannot be Men as they have no religion." Meanwhile, what some Europeans considered evidence of the Old Testament reached new heights of absurdity. Canon Johann Jakob Scheuchzer found a fossil of what he claimed was a relic of "the accursed race that must have been swallowed up by the waters" of the Great Flood. Less than a century later, French naturalist Georges Cuvier demonstrated that the bones had really belonged to a giant salamander.

Most Recent Additions

Year: 1799

Scientist/artist: Charles White

Originally published in: An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables

Now appears in: The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould and Humankind by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

This particularly odious depiction of "lower" and "higher" life forms was once widely accepted as part of the Great Chain of Being. In this depiction, the lowest form of human life is the Negro, and at the top of the ladder is the Greek ideal. The depictions are carefully arranged so that "lower" humans appear in close proximity to "lower" animals. "In whatever respect the African differs from the European," White wrote, "the particularity brings him nearer to the ape."

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Year: 1799

Scientist/artist: Charles White

Originally published in: An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables

Now appears in: Humankind by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

White described this plate as including "copies of the best authenticated engraving" of apes, as well as profiles of a "native of Botany Bay" and an African.

Year: 1617

Scientist/artist: Robert Fludd

Originally published as: The Great Chain of Being

Now appears in: "Science by the Eyeful" in Science and Robert Fludd and His Images of The Divine by Urszula Szulakowska in Public Domain Review

The Great Chain of Being didn't come into existence with Charles White's 1799 diagram. The concept dated back to the ancient Greeks. Persisting throughout the centuries, the great chain was a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, with God at the top and minerals at the bottom. Humans ranked above the other Earthly life forms (though, as White's diagram shows, humans could also be ranked by race). At first glance, the Great Chain of Being might look like an early form of evolutionary theory, but it wasn't. The hierarchy wasn't only strict, it was static and, unlike evolution, precluded change. However the Great Chain of Being might have influenced how some early biologists thought about biological diversity, including "higher" and "lower" life forms. One of many people to document the great chain, Robert Fludd was an English physician who worked in the court of King James I. In his vision, the Goddess of Wisdom stands above all life forms on Earth, just below the angels. In 2014, this diagram was among the oldest illustrations on display in the British Library's Beautiful Science exhibition highlighting science visualizations over the centuries.

Year: 1731

Scientist/artist: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer

Originally published in: Sacred Physics

Now appears in: Crossing Over by Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell

Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer found the Old Testament a perfectly plausible account of the history of life on Earth. But he also tried to reconcile the story with discoveries about the natural world, including the existence of apes. In this image, Scheuchzer compared biblical Esau (Jacob's inordinately hairy, slightly dim-witted older twin) with a "satyr" (the term at the time for chimpanzees). The 18th-century naturalist stopped short of calling the father of the Edomites an ape. "Nonetheless, in making this comparison, I do not wish to insinuate that Esau was a Satyr, nor that this race of savage animals has descended from him. I consider Esau as a monstrous man."

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Year: 1838

Scientist: Pierre Boitard

Originally published in: "L'Homme Fossile" (Fossil Man) in Magasin Universel

Now appears in: Earth's Deep History by Martin J.S. Rudwick

When this illustration was published, the discovery of the first recognized Neanderthal fossil was nearly two decades in the future, and the discovery of the first Homo erectus (originally named Pithecanthropus erectus) fossil was over five decades away. That didn't keep Boitard from speculating about "fossil man," including the prediction that he was at the same time dark-skinned, simian and furry — and simultaneously equipped with monkey-like feet and axes. In fact, under the furry coat, ape skin is often light, not dark. Fossil and genetic evidence indicates that humans evolved in Africa where heavy sunlight exposure would have selected for dark skin, but this illustration may have more to do with an assumption common throughout the 19th century: Dark skin is a mark of primitive people.

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Year: 1840

Originally published as: Promotional poster

Now appears at: BGS Geoheritage (http://britgeoheritage.blogspot.com/ 2013/08/poster-advertising- exhibition-of-human.html)

Even if 19th-century geologists had accepted an ancient Earth shaped by the same geological and meteorological processes that operate now, members of the public largely clung to a biblical interpretation of the planet's past. The "human fossil" advertised here hasn't survived in modern collections, but was probably a concretion. The admission price for this spectacle, £1, was no small chuck of change. Adjusted for inflation, it would equal roughly £100, or about $125, today ("today" meaning Brexit — possibly even a crash-out Brexit — still looms but hasn't yet happened because Brexiteers haven't exactly matched their anti-EU enthusiasm with planning).

Year: 1731

Scientist/artist: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer

Originally published in: Sacred Physics

Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy and Cradle of Life by J. William Schopf

"The reality of the Universal Deluge, albeit acknowledged for many centuries, has never been more patent than it is at the present time." So declared Scheuchzer in describing this specimen, which he named Homo diluvii testis. This "witness to the flood" was a 4-foot-long fossil with eyes that had apparently widened their sockets with horror at the rising waters. Decades later, Georges Cuvier reexamined and cleaned the fossil, and discovered its clawed forefeet. It wasn't a human witness to Noah's flood; it was a big, extinct salamander. The species was later renamed, in Scheuchzer 's dubious honor, Andrias scheuchzeri.

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Year: c. 1765

Explorer: John Byron

Now appears in: Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose by Lee Alan Dugatkin

An 18th-century misconception about the New World was that cold, damp conditions there stunted its inhabitants. The French naturalist Buffon long embraced this idea, but he wasn't alone. Cornelius de Pauw, son of a director of the Dutch West Indies Company, also insisted that the New World was cold and its people and animals were scrawny. Arguing against Buffon and de Pauw was Thomas Jefferson, who assembled physical specimens of big American animals. Also arguing against them was a French Benedictine monk named Antoine-Joseph Pernety, who revived a legend dating back to the 16th century. In 1520, Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian explorer accompanying Ferdinand Magellan, wrote of a Patagonian giant taken onboard the ship. This tall tale got an 18th-century reinforcement from the British admiral John Byron who commanded the Dolphin. He claimed to have met a 7-foot-tall Patagonian chief, and further claimed that few of the other men in the tribe were shorter. The alleged meeting is depicted here. Byron's story gained traction during the 1760s, with some outlets describing the Patagonians' height at 8 or 9 feet, but de Pauw rejected the story as fabulous, writing, "some living proofs of their existence would certainly have been brought to Europe: or, at least, their skeletons." De Pauw went on for 30 more pages refuting the Patagonian giant claim. This might have made sense except that the Amsterdam native never bothered to gather physical evidence of anything he wrote about the New World, not even for his assertion that Native American mothers molded their babies' heads into conical or square shapes. He also wrote that Western Hemisphere frogs weighed as much as 37 pounds. That might have been interpreted as an argument against New World puniness but de Pauw insisted that giant frogs were a further sign of degeneracy since frogs are icky.

Years: 1839-1849, 1977-1996

Scientists: Samuel George Morton, Stephen Jay Gould

Artist: John Collins

Originally published in: Crania Americana

Now appears in: "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias" by Lewis et al. in PLoS Biology

In the mid-19th century, Morton measured hundreds of skulls from different ethnic groups to determine differences in cranial capacity, initially using mustard seed and later, on a more diverse sample, lead shot. In the late 20th century, Gould reanalyzed Morton's results and found them lacking, as he explained in The Mismeasure of Man. Gould did not accuse Morton of deliberately falsifying his results, and pointed out that Morton published his raw data, something he wouldn't have done if he felt he had anything to hide. But Morton's conclusions that Caucasians consistently came out on top, plus changes in some skull measurements between the seed-based and shot-based studies, led Gould to conclude that Morton's assumptions about race subconsciously influenced his results. Gould did not actually re-measure Morton's skulls, but in the early 21st century, a group of anthropologists did — at least some of them. They found that Morton, whom Gould made the poster boy of a priori assumptions, had actually done a reasonably accurate job. The errors he did make were mostly random, and the skulls he consistently inflated were Egyptian, people he would have classified as Negro. Ironically, Gould's findings on cranial capacity were actually closer to the assumptions he presumed Morton made than were Morton's own findings. The 2011 study concluded that Gould's criticisms of Morton were at best poorly substantiated and at worst false. Morton's study did include errors, and he apparently held views that typified the racism of the time, but the 2011 researchers concluded, "Biased scientists are inevitable, biased results are not." A Nature editorial the following week observed, "Of course, Lewis and his colleagues have their own motivations. Several in the group have an association with the University of Pennsylvania, and have an interest in seeing the valuable but understudied skull collection freed from the stigma of bias (although, as for many 19th-century museum collections, its ethically dubious assembly will remain an issue)."

Year: 1839

Scientist: Samuel George Morton

Published in: : "Skin Deep" by Elizabeth Kolbert in National Geographic (top) and Crania Americana (bottom)

Book text now available at: Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ Craniaamericana00Mort)

Although Stephen Jay Gould may have unfairly assessed Samuel Morton cranial measurements, Gould wasn't wrong about Morton's role in the history of racism masquerading as science. Morton divided humanity into five races: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay (Southeast Asian), (Native) American and Ethiopian (Black). That order shows pretty much how he ranked them intellectually and morally. The skulls shown here are from Morton's collection, and as Elizabeth Kolbert explains, Morton "wasn't choosy about his suppliers." From left to right, they are a black female and white male from America, an indigenous male from Mexico, a Chinese female, and a Malaysian male. In Crania Americana , Morton spelled out the merits, or lack thereof, of different groups, dividing his identified races with more specific varieties. "The moral character of the Germans is marked by decided personal courage, great endurance of fatigue, firmness and perseverance, and a strong attachment to their families and their native land. Intellectually they are conspicuous for industry and success in the acquisition of knowledge: with a singular blending of taciturnity and enthusiasm, they rival all modern nations in music, poetry and the drama; nor are they less conspicuous for their critical attainments in language, and the exact sciences," he wrote. Africans, however, were altogether different. "The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations. Thus the Makouas and Ashantees have continued to be the uncompromising enemies of the European colonists, and remain to this day unsubdued. The fiery and revengeful Eboe contrasts strongly with the docile native of Benguela. The Kroomen of the western coast are an intelligent and industrious people, while many of the tribes of the Niger are remarkably stupid and slothful. The Mandingoes are tractable and honest; but the Lucumi, who also inhabit the western coast, are a brave and independent people, who in captivity will even resort to suicide to avoid punishment or disgrace. The Caravalli tribe is remarkable for combining industry and avarice; and it is observed in the West Indies that they constitute the greater proportion of the free Negroes who become rich. On the other hand, all the tribes of Congo, and they are very numerous, are noted for indolence, deception and falsehood. The Negroes are proverbially fond of their amusements, in which they engage with great exuberance of spirit; and a day of toil is with them no bar to a night of revelry." He was convinced — as were many of his contemporaries — that the races resulted from separate acts of divine creation. Kolbert recounts how well Morton's ideas went over in America's Antebellum South, where South Carolina's Charleston Medical Journal thanked Morton for "giving the negro his true position as an inferior race." The conclusions of modern DNA analysis, showing African ancestry for all modern humans, would likely explode Morton's own skull into pieces too tiny for him to measure with his own facial goniometer.

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Year: 1854

Scientists: Josiah Nott and George Gliddon

Originally published in: Types of Mankind

Now available at: Types of Mankind (http://books.google.com/ books?id=9osXAAAAYAAJ &source=gbs_navlinks_s)

Fondly dedicated to the memory of craniometry founder Samuel Morton, Nott and Gliddon's book promoted polygenism — the idea that human races had been created separately, were unrelated to each other and were emphatically unequal. Nott and Gliddon devoted a considerable chunk of their 700+-page book to arguing that African slaves deserved their lowly position. Naturally the book was a big hit in the antebellum South. Opposed to both shared ancestry of all humans and (presumably) the Emancipation Proclamation, Nott and Gliddon wrote, "To one living in, or conversant with, the Slave-States of North America, it need not be told, that the Negroes, in ten generations, have not made the slightest physical approach either towards our aboriginal population, or to any other race. As a mnemonic, we here subjoin, sketched by a friend, the likenesses of two Negroes (Figs. 179, 180) who ply their avocations every day in the streets of Mobile where anybody could in a single morning collect a hundred other quite as strongly marked. . . . Mr. Lyell, in common with tourists less eminent, but in this question not less misinformed, has somewhere stated, that the Negroes in America are undergoing a manifest improvement in this physical type. He has no doubt that they will, in time, show a development in skull and intellect quite equal to the whites. This unscientific assertion is disproved by the cranial measurements of Dr. Morton." And how could Nott and Gliddon be sure that sub-Saharan Africans were unchanging? Because of biblical chronology. "The authors confidently trust, that the antiquity of Negro races, no less than the permanence of Negro types, during the (1853+2348) 4201 years that have just elapsed since Usher's Flood, are questions now satisfactorily set at rest in the minds of lettered and scientific readers." Furthermore, ancient Egyptians had enslaved sub-Saharan Africans, which justified continuing the practice, Nott and Gliddon argued. And slaves didn't have it so bad. "For the sake of illustrating that, even in Ancient Egypt, African slavery was not altogether unmitigated by moments of congenial enjoyment; not always inseparable from the lash and the hand-cuff; we submit a copy of some Negroes 'Dancing in the streets of Thebes', by way of archaeological evidence that, 8400 years ago; (or before the Exodus of Israel, B.C. 1822), 'de same ole Nigger' of our Southern plantations could spend his Nilotic sabbaths in saltatory recreations, and 'Turn about, and wheel about, and jump Jim Crow!'" Wow.

Year: 1854

Scientists: Josiah Nott and George Gliddon

Originally published in: Types of Mankind

Now appears at: Understanding Race (http://www.understandingrace.org/ history/science/one_race.html) and Institute for Historical Biology (http://www.wm.edu/as/anthropology/ research/ihb/index.php)

If, in the antebellum American South, you didn't want to spend hours scouring the Bible for a suitable verse to justify slavery (and keep those pesky abolitionists at bay), you could turn to Nott and Gliddon's book, which was conveniently all about justifying slavery. Their argument revolved around polygenism — different origins for different human races — an idea adopted by the 19th-century celebrity naturalist Louis Agassiz. Agassiz lectured throughout the northern and southern United States on polygenism, and this table (split and stacked on this page) bears the caption, "Tableau to accompany Prof. Agassiz's 'sketch'." The columns correspond to different parts of the world, with different human species, as Nott and Gliddon perceived them, topping off each column. The variation in human skull shapes that Nott and Gliddon depicted is, to put it charitably, more than what a careful anthropologist would likely detect. As for the animals, the authors perhaps hoped to make the visual argument that human races differ from each other as much as, say, a walrus and a deer. The Caucasian looks very much like Georges Cuvier, whose views on race weren't much more enlightened. He described native Africans as "the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government."

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Year: 1854

Scientists: Josiah Nott and George Gliddon

Originally published in: Types of Mankind

Now appears at: Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ typesmankindore01pattgoog)

In arguing for separate origins of human races, which they designated as different species, plantation-era slavery apologists Nott and Gliddon, relied on the scientific authority of no less a figure than Moses. They also relied on Moses's apparent nemesis when it proved convenient. Ancient Egyptians, they wrote, "divided mankind into four species: viz., the Red, Black, White, and Yellow; and, what is note-worthy, the same perplexing diversity existed in each of their quadripartite divisions which still pervades our modern classifications." This illustration provides an example of each species the authors claimed the Egyptians "faithfully represented on their monuments." What a remarkable coincidence that the Ancient Egyptians would have used the exact same racial terminology as Nott and Gliddon, and their contemporaries. In Collecting the World , his biography of Hans Sloane, historian James Delbourgo observes that Europeans didn't begin characterizing Asians as having yellow skin until the 18th and 19th centuries. So the system Nott and Gliddon said Egyptians employed in the 15th century BC must have somehow fallen out of favor only to be rediscovered before the publication of their book. They continued that "although the Red, or Egyptian, type was represented with considerable uniformity, the White, Yellow, and Black, are often depicted, in their hieroglyphed drawings, with different physiognomies; thus proving, that the same endless variety of races existed at that ancient day that we observe in the same localities at the present hour." Lucky coincidences never cease.

Year: 1857

Scientist: George R. Gliddon

Originally published in: Indigenous Races of the Earth

Now appears in: "The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue" by David Livingstone in Journal of Historical Geography

Gliddon was a practitioner of anthropometric cartography, and he argued that climate drove character. This image is part of a diagram he included in his book, "Chart illustrative of the geographical distribution of monkeys in their relation to that of some inferior types of men." Besides arguing that no civilization had ever arisen where black people lived, he went on to say, "the most superior types of Monkeys are found to be indigenous exactly where we encounter races of some of the most inferior types of Men." Many of Gliddon's contemporaries agreed with him (Alexander von Humboldt being a notable exception). The reasoning went like this: People living in temperate climates were fashioned by nature to be smart, hardworking, upright citizens. People who lived in the tropics were slackers, and pretty loose slackers at that. You would think, considering the presumed relationship between cold and character, that people living in or near the Arctic would be overachievers, but no. Somehow they were slackers, too. As for whether the races shared a common origin, convictions varied. Gliddon believed in multiple origins, but others argued that we all arose from common stock, only some races improved over time, and the races that headed south (or too far north) degenerated.

Year: 1876

Scientist: William Gunning

Originally published in: Life History of Our Planet

Now appears at: Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ lifehistoryourp02gunngoog)

Figure 74 from the 1876 edition of Life History of Our Planet is a diagram of human races as Gunning saw fit to divide them. Gunning apparently believed that you could figure out all you needed to know about people from their hair. In this figure, A encompasses all the races with straight or curly hair, further broken down into subgroups; B includes what he called tuft- and fleece-haired races. (See the larger image for Gunning's figure caption.) Near the end of his chapter on human variation, Gunning concluded, "This sketch has been purposely brief. It has been full enough to show that all the civilized and progressive races have spring from the extinct Aryan race; that most of the arrested civilizations are Mongolian and Semitic; that most of the savage races are the non-Aryans of India, the pelagic races, and, generally, the races of dark skin and woolly hair."

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Year: 1883

Artist: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

Published in: Comparative Anatomy as Applied to the Purposes of the Artist

Now appears at: Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/ comparativeanato00hawk)

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's book, written for the benefit of fellow artists, includes a scene of people and apes. The text explains, "The white man is a suggestive figure of the great friend of the negro race — the slave-emancipator, [William] Wilberforce — who is represented as offering the hand of brotherhood to the negro figure, who from long oppression reciprocates but timidly the friendly action." Hawkins apparently admired Wilberforce's abolitionist efforts, but 19th-century opposition to slavery hardly guaranteed acceptance of racial equality. In this scene, the African's lower face projects forward so much that it matches that of an ape, an impression helped by the backward tilt of the head, and the African's cranium is smaller than the European's. It's tempting to think we all know better now, but in 2015, a U.S. Supreme Court justice reportedly remarked that African Americans seeking higher education might do well to "go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school, where they do well," and claiming that most of the country's African American scientists "come from lesser schools." It appears some room for race-relations improvement remains.

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Year: 1895

Scientist: Paul Du Chaillu

Originally published in: Stories of the Gorilla Country

Now appears in: "Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer" by Richard Conniff in The New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2011/02/13/race-sex-and-the- trials-a-young-explorer/)

In the mid-19th century, an intrepid young explorer named Paul Du Chaillu ventured into the jungles of Gabon. In the four years he spent there, he encountered gorillas, and brought back some 20 specimens. They arrived on the scientific scene about the time that Darwin and Wallace introduced the theory of natural selection. Gorillas are certainly big and strong, but Du Chaillu depicted the gorilla as a "hellish dream creature." In writing about his African expedition, he also embellished accounts of his travels, and may even have plagiarized the works of others. Yet Du Chaillu's reputation tanked not so much for what he wrote about Africa as for his alleged relationship to it. Whispers circulated that amateur naturalist wasn't entirely white. The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia sponsored Du Chaillu's trip, and science historian Richard Conniff argues that the same academy might have kicked Du Chaillu out in 1860 at least in part because an academy officer named George Ord fretted over the shape of the naturalist's head and facial features. In short, Ord wrote, he discerned "evidence of spurious origin." Du Chaillu's father was a slave owner and his mother was probably mixed race — something Ord blamed for Du Chaillu's overly dramatic accounts of his travels. "If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance."

Year: 1794

Scientist/artist: Pieter Camper

Originally published in: The Works of the Late Professor Camper

Now appears in: Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara

It's far from obvious, but this image was actually intended to show that differences between races were superficial. Dutch anatomist Camper was an abolitionist. The faces appear along a spectrum that measures the angle at which the face slopes backward — from apes to Apollo. Although the grid lines lend an air of mathematical finality, the scale is really one of aesthetics, with the unlikely pinnacle of a Greek god. Although aimed at minimizing the perceived differences between races, this diagram apparently had the opposite effect.

Year: 1795

Scientist/artist: J.F. Blumenbach

Originally published in: De generis humani varietate nativa

Now appears in: I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould

Pieter Camper wasn't the only well-intentioned 18th-century naturalist whose work had the opposite effect of what he hoped. Although he probably assumed (as did everyone he knew) that Europeans outshone everybody else, Blumenbach was an abolitionist who maintained that slaves' morality often surpassed that of their masters. (He especially admired the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave.) Moreover, Blumenbach argued forcefully that humans comprised a single species — hardly a view shared by many of his peers. But Blumenbach made a blunder with long-lasting effects. Whereas his role model Linnaeus had classified human races based on geography, Blumenbach classified them based on a purely subjective judgment: beauty. Blumenbach concluded that mankind arose — and the most beautiful people on Earth continued to live — in the Caucasus (hence Caucasian). He figured that other races diverged from their ancestral types as they adapted to different environments. This illustration shows the "ideal" Caucasian skull in the middle. Moving toward the left are American Indian and Mongolian skulls. On the right are Malay and African skulls. Blumenbach's personal preference became, for many people, just more evidence of intellectual and moral superiority.

Year: 1822

Scientist/artist: William Buckland

Originally published in: Goat Hole Cave, Paviland

Now appears in: Homo Britannicus by Chris Stringer

William Buckland completed one of the first, if not the very first, reconstructions of living habits when he examined fossil hyena remains in Kirkdale Cave. About the same time, he discovered an ancient human skeleton: a Cro-Magnon fossil at Goat Hole Cave. Buckland produced detailed diagrams of the cave and noted that the skeleton was covered with red ochre, possibly the result of a burial ceremony. Buckland probably had no way of knowing how ancient or significant his find was. He also had no great means of determining the individual's gender. He described the ancient human (perhaps jokingly) as a witch, then gave the more palatable name of "Red Lady of Paviland." The ochre-covered human was less-than-average height for a Cro-Magnon male fossil, at least compared to other finds, and that might explain why Buckland misinterpreted the male fossil as female. Still, for such an early find, it wasn't a bad effort.

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Year: c. 330-310 BC

Now appears in: The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor, and Fragment of a terracotta volute-krater courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This pottery fragment depicts the Greek hero Heracles (Hercules) making initial contact with Queen Hippolyte and some of her fellow Amazons. Different versions of the legend give different accounts of the two falling out, and Heracles making off with the queen's storied belt, but they were said to be on friendly terms at the start. Although Heracles may have been mythical, the Amazon stories were rooted in reality. Scythians were Eurasian nomads ranging from north of the Black Sea eastward to China. Compared to their Greek contemporaries, who probably left the most written records of the nomads, Scythian society displayed a tremendous gender parity. Horses may have been the great equalizer in Scythian groups, where women and men alike wore trousers and fought in battle. Modern archaeological excavations have turned up numerous graves of Scythian women buried with sumptuous grave goods and combat wounds. But at least one legend about the Amazons is likely wrong; the ancient warrior women did not remove their breasts to improve their archery skills. Adrienne Mayor explains that the rumor lent the warrior women a "terrifying asymmetry" typical of barbarians, and in stark contrast to docile Greek wives. Another legend about the Amazons might have been rooted in a different reality closer to home. The Greek island of Samos was believed to be the scene of an epic battle where Dionysus and his comrades faced Amazons. Ancient Greeks attributed the island's red soil to blood spilled in battle, and identified the island's giant bones as those of the mythical opponents. (Giants apparently abounded both in Greek mythology and in the Bible.) In fact, the big bones were fossils: ancestors of giraffes, elephants and rhinos that lived during the Miocene epoch between 5 million and 25 million years ago.

Year: 1493

Originally published in: Nuremberg Chronicle

Now appears in: Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos

Europeans imagined all sorts of odd "people" lived elsewhere in the world: people with horns, with giant floppy ears, with giant single feet, to name a few. This late 15th-century publication shows a few of the odd humans assumed to live elsewhere. The bottom picture shows a human whose face appears on his or her torso. The middle picture is of a cyclops. The top picture is apparently of a werewolf crossed with a cheesy lounge singer.

Year: 1475

Scientist/artist: Konrad von Megenberg

Originally published in: Book of Nature

Now appears in: "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters" by Rudolf Wittkower in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 1942

The notion that faraway lands — India in particular — held monstrous human races arose in Antiquity, when some Greek scholars spread fabulous accounts. The Greeks had their share of skeptics who challenged such stories, but while the skeptics' criticisms were lost to medieval Europeans, the fantastic tales lived on, thanks to the uncritical writings of Pliny and others. For all their belief in monstrous races, Europeans in the Middle Ages adopted a pretty generous stance about them, insisting that even the monstrous races were God's children. Monsters as portents of divine punishment may have been more common during the sectarian tensions of the Reformation.

Century: 13th

Scientist/artist: Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud Abu Yahya al-Qazwini

Originally published in: Aja'ib al-Makhluqat

Now appears in: Science in Medieval Islam by Howard R. Turner

Just as Europeans had outlandish ideas of odd people who might live far away, Muslim scholars entertained equally fanciful notions. Published in what is today Iraq, this encyclopedia of the "Wonders of Creation" covered a range of topics, mixing fact and fiction about geography and biology.

Year: 1851

Scientist/artist: Robert Knox

Originally published in: The Races of Men

Now appears in: Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus

If the work of Robert Knox was any indication, not much improved in race relations between the beginning and the middle of the 19th century. To Victorian minds, a sloping forehead implied and tiny brain, and Knox sure wanted his readers to get his point about people of color.

Year: 1758

Scientist/artist: Carolus Linnaeus

Originally published in: Systema Naturae

Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas

It's impossible to overestimate the contribution Linnaeus made to science — he developed the system for classifying all living organisms that is still in use today. Yet his uncertainty about how to classify apes and humans is obvious from some of his depictions. He even developed terms such as "day man" and "night man," and admitted that he couldn't find a characteristic to differentiate humans from apes.

Year: 1658

Scientist: Edward Topsell

Originally published in: Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes

Now appears at: Topsell's Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes at the University of Houston Digital Library

This 17th-century depiction of a full-bodied beast with long claws and a human face might have looked like a human-hybrid monster to the people who read Topsell's book. It was then known as Arctopithecus (the bear-ape), a New World animal utterly foreign to Europeans. Today it seems a little more benign. It's a three-toed sloth.

Year: 1812

Scientist/artist: F. Jacob

Originally published in: Histoire Naturelle des Singes

Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas

Jacob showed the fetus of a monkey and a human side by side to illustrate their similarities, maintaining that the only thing the monkey lacked was a soul.

Year: 1868

Scientist: Ernst Haeckel

Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte

Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas and Aristotle's Ladder, Darwin's Tree by J. David Archibald

Haeckel divided humanity into no less than 12 distinct species, based upon hair type, skull shape, skin color and eye color. Although he believed humanity now comprised 12 species, he maintained that they had all arisen from a single ancestral type that once lived on a continent now submerged beneath the Indian Ocean. Archibald notes that this image really consists of an ancestry tree superimposed upon a map, perhaps the first published graphic of that kind.

Year: 1868

Scientist: Ernst Haeckel

Artist: Gustav Müller

Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1st edition)

Now appears in: "Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud" by Nick Hopwood in Isis June 2006 issue

Reminiscent of Charles White's 1799 diagram, this illustration pointed out the affinity between the "lowest humans" and "highest apes." The heads pictured here were supposed to represent — from best to worst, so to speak — Indo-German, Chinese, Fuegian, Australian Negro, African Negro, Tasmanian, gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, gibbon, proboscis monkey, and mandrill. An interesting shift from White's diagram was that the best of the best was no longer Grecian but German. In fairness to Haeckel, he didn't like this illustration much (his publisher apparently did), but an expanded version appeared in the second edition of his book. Haeckel was, to say the least, confident of the superiority of the white race, as were many of his contemporaries. But at least one scientist, Michael Foster described the illustration in Haeckel's second book as "at once absurdly horrible and theatrically grotesque, without any redeeming feature either artistic or scientific."

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Year: 1870

Scientist: Ernst Haeckel

Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (2nd edition)

Now appears in: The Tragic Sense of Life by Robert J. Richards

For the second edition of Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte , Haeckel drafted new pictures. As in similar diagrams published earlier, the pinnacle of humanity was the Greek or German ideal, but this time, the pinnacle sported a beard. So, by pure coincidence, did Haeckel.

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Year: 1902

Scientist: Ernst Haeckel

Artist: Gabriel von Max

Originally published in: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (10th edition)

Now appears in: The Tragic Sense of Life by Robert J. Richards (Also discussed in The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould)

This picture illustrates a hunch Haeckel first had in the 1870s. At that point, he didn't have fossils, but he had imagination. In his hypothetical human evolutionary tree, Haeckel included Pithecanthropus alalus, meaning ape-man without speech. In fact, his hypothesis was correct in one respect: Upright walking preceded big brains, something clearly demonstrated with the 1974 find of Lucy. When Eugène Dubois found Java Man in the 1990s, he applied Haeckel's genus name, but Pithecanthropus erectus has since been changed to Homo erectus. But few other fossil reconstructions have envisioned hominids quite like this. In the words of Robert Richards, this looks like a contented burgher family. These speechless people-apes might derive their contentment from the fact that they're not in Haeckel's next hypothetical species en route to modern man: Homo stupidus.

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Year: 1874

Scientist: Ernst Haeckel

Originally published in: Anthropogenie; oder, Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen

Now appears in: Aristotle's Ladder, Darwin's Tree by J. David Archibald

Paleontologist and science historian J. David Archibald notes that Haeckel claimed all humans arose from a single ancestor, but the English translation of Haeckel's text suggests otherwise. It reads, "Both the African Manlike Apes [gorillas and chimpanzees] are black in color, and like their countrymen, the Negroes, have the head long from back to front (dolichocephalic). The Asiatic Manlike Apes are, on the contrary mostly of a brown, or yellowish brown color, and have the head short from back to front (brachycephalic), like their countrymen, the Malays and Mongols." Haeckel placed the African man in what appeared to be his rightful place, among the apes. The label for this figure, Neger, is a German term which apparently has a meaning just like the similar-sounding English term. Archibald writes that Haeckel "saw no problems couching racist views under the aegis of science."

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Year: 1909

Scientist: Marcellin Boule

Artist: Frantisek Kupka

Originally published in: The Illustrated London News

Now appears in: Life by Richard Fortey, God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark and "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" by Marianne Sommer in Social Studies of Science (Also discussed in Java Man by Swisher, Curtis and Lewin)

The first fairly complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered in 1908 by Amadee and Jean Bouyssonie and L. Bardon. The "Old Man of La Chapelle" showed indications of intentional burial, a topic that would be debated for decades. But in the early 20th century, scientists tussled over myriad issues, including the basic question of how long ago the Neanderthal lived. Today the La Chapelle skeleton is estimated at roughly 60,000 years old, but when the skeleton was first found, scientists had few means of figuring out its exact age. Marcellin Boule estimated the skeleton's age at just 20,000 years. Another basic question dealt with how different Neanderthals were from us. Earlier hypotheses about the first recognized Neanderthal fossil, found in the 1850s, suggested that that individual suffered from rickets, hence the bowed legs, and that the pain from the condition caused the sufferer to habitually furrow his brow, producing prominent brow ridges. (In fact, extensive use of muscles can cause bone buildup where those muscles attach, but they can't make a modern human skull look Neanderthal.) Boule worked with the artist Frantisek Kupka, who rendered this Neanderthal as very different from modern humans: hairy, savage, blank-faced, wielding a club. The Illustrated London News quickly reproduced Kupka's illustration. How much Boule approved of this particular image isn't entirely clear.

Year: 1929

Scientists: Oliver C. Farrington and Henry Field

Published in: "Neanderthal (Mousterian) Man" Field Museum Geology Leaflet 11

Images provided by: Biodiversity Heritage Library (digitized with permission of copyright holder)

The "Old Man of La Chapelle" discovered in 1908 suffered from severe arthritis in his neck, shoulders, back and hip, but early-20th-century anthropologists interpreted these physical ailments as Neanderthal normal. As a result, 20 years after Frantisek Kupka depicted a Neanderthal as a brute that couldn't stand up straight, the image persisted. In fact, Farrington and Field claimed that the "head and shoulders were habitually bent forward. It was impossible for them to stand fully erect." As for the body hair, the authors wrote, "Unfortunately for the completion of the restorations there are no data from which information as to the type, quality, and quantity of the hairy covering of the heads and bodies of people of this race could be obtained." Then, after comparing Neanderthals to "the primitive men of Australia," the authors noted their decision to "follow their hirsute type." In these reconstructions, the grown man displays the assumed hirsutism, and both the man and the boy display permanently stooped posture.

Year: 1911

Scientist: Marcellin Boule

Originally published in: L'Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints

Now appears in: Neanderthals in 3D by Lydia Pyne in Public Domain Review

After his earliest interpretations of Neanderthal, Marcellin Boule continued his research of the ancient human species, and in 1911, completed an in-depth monograph. He included with the monograph several images of the fossil human's skull produced with a stereoscope, an optical tool capable of giving a two-dimensional object a three-dimensional appearance. The stereoscope had already proven useful to anatomists studying modern bodies, so its employment in paleoanthropology made sense. But the stereoscope caused a certain problem. To acquire a three-dimensional view of the skull, Boule had to prop it up on a stand. Pyne writes, "Although the props would have been necessary to precisely line up the two images, they introduce a subtle laboratory rhetoric to the Neanderthal plates and L'Homme writ large." Perhaps unconsciously, Boule picked a reclined angle for this prehistoric skull, with the lower jaw jutting far out ahead of the forehead. He probably would not have propped up a modern European skull in quite the same way. Pyne continues, "In the decades after Boule's publication of the La Chapelle Neanderthal, his interpretation of Neanderthals was quickly co-opted into the popular caricature of a slouchy, barbaric troglodyte. The Neanderthal, according to Boule, was a sad specimen of nature — an evolutionary dead-end, to put it most kindly."

Year: 1911

Artist: Charles R. Knight

Title: Snowbound

Now appears in: Staten Island Museum, New York City, Wikipedia

The arthritic "Old Man of La Chapelle" skeleton likely influenced this painting. Knight shows a trio of hunched, hapless Neanderthals enduring a snowstorm. "Poor little devils," Knight reportedly remarked, "they had such a hard time." Knight wasn't wrong about the tough environment. Regarding Neanderthals, Wellesley College anthropology professor Adam Van Arsdale, remarks, "If we think about the evolutionary reality of humans for the last million and half years, as they've occupied large stretches of Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe was probably always fairly marginal, on the peripheries of [the habitable] environment. Europe was one of the last areas of the Old World to be occupied. And throughout the late Pleistocene, as we had major ice age events, it became an even smaller space, as populations where restricted to Southern Europe."

Year: 1920

Author: H.G. Wells

Originally published in: The Outline of History

Image provided by: Educational Technology Clearinghouse and Project Gutenberg

In his book on the history of life, Wells borrows from Worthington Smith's Man the Primeval Savage . Worthington Smith and Wells envision a family group headed by one Old Man — a very grumpy Old Man. Wells writes, "The Old Man is the only fully adult male in the little group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough to rouse the Old Man's jealousy, he will fall foul of them and either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they may try to steal a mate. Then they would probably fall out among themselves. Someday, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead. There is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting-place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble and death come upon them." Reinforcing the Neanderthal-as-ogre interpretation, this illustration gives the Old Man brow ridges worthy of a gorilla, and an unrealistically flat nose.

Year: 1920

Author: H.G. Wells

Originally published in: The Outline of History

Image provided by: Project Gutenberg

Despite his ability to conjure futuristic worlds in his writings, H.G. Wells was not much ahead of his time in race relations. This image shows a portion of his diagram of relationships of human races. Though he acknowledges interbreeding, he divvies up human groups with a specificity rather foreign to a 21st-century reader. And note which group he places at the stem of the tree. The racial views Wells expresses in his 1902 book Anticipations are chilling: "The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear."

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Year: 1911

Scientist: Arthur Keith

Artist: Amédée Forestier

Originally published in: The Illustrated London News

Now appears in: "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" by Marianne Sommer in Social Studies of Science

In sharp contrast to French paleontologist Marcellin Boule (above), British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith believed that humans had acquired more or less modern anatomy very long ago. (He also believed that humans originated in Europe, and he has been named as the possible culprit behind the Piltdown Hoax.) The picture of the spear-wielding specimen on the left was titled, "Modern Man, the Mammoth-Slayer: The Briton of 170,000 Years Ago." This was based on the Galley Hill Man, considered to be a modern human. Only slightly less impressive was the specimen on the right, the Neanderthal known as the Old Man of La Chapelle, and this vignette was titled, "Not in the 'Gorilla' Stage: The Man of 500,000 Years Ago." Boule's estimate of the La Chapelle Neanderthal age was off from modern estimates by some 40,000 years, but his guess was much closer than Keith's. By modern estimates, Neanderthals did not evolve until about 200,000 years ago. Anatomically modern humans — and that term is less straightforward than you might think since it's based on an overall tendency toward modern features — evolved at about the same time, but they first evolved in Africa, not Europe. So Keith substantially overestimated the age of both the mammoth-hunting Briton and the Neanderthal. But the rendition of this noble Neanderthal is arguably closer to modern interpretations than Boule's brute.

Year: 1922

Originally published in: Illustrated London News

Scientists: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Grafton Elliot Smith

Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark

The year 1922 found the American Museum of Natural History's Henry Fairfield Osborn clashing with ardent anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan, the "Scopes Monkey Trial" being just a few years away. When Nebraska paleontologist Harold Cook found a fossil tooth that might belong to a primate, Osborn saw his opportunity. How deliciously ironic that an early human tooth might come from Bryan's own home state! Well, the tooth did come from Nebraska. It also came from a pig. Bryan and generations of creationists delighted in pointing out Osborn's gaffe. Fewer have been anxious to acknowledge that the definitive debunking of Hesperopithecus (Nebraska Man) came from William King Gregory — an evolutionist and Osborn's own former student.

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Year: 1927

Appears in: "Recent Discoveries Relating to the Origin and Antiquity of Man" in Science

Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn

In a single paper in Science, Osborn slammed Darwin, Haeckel and Huxley for missing or ignoring "the profound cleft between ape and man;" asserted that "the home of primitive man should be looked for in the same kind of country in which the primitive horse flourished" (that would be Asia); asserted that Neanderthals didn't have to work hard to find food or survive in their environment; insisted that the ancestors of the "higher races of man" could not occur "south of the Neanderthal Eurasiatic belt, because to the south conditions of life were less rigorous;" and described the brain capacity of Homo erectus as "not far inferior to that of the native Indian Veddahs." And he backed up his assertions with the evidence of Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man. Piltdown Man hadn't yet been exposed as a hoax, and Nebraska Man's tooth hadn't yet been identified as that of a pig. This unwelcome bit of dental news would arrive — also in Science — several months later.

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Year: 1931

Originally published in: The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces

Scientist: Francis Crookshank

Now appears in: "Welcome to the Twilight Zone: A Forgotten Early Phase of Human Evolutionary Studies" by Richard G. Delisle in Endeavour

British physician Crookshank laid out his view of human ancestry in 1931. He believed in polyphyletism, i.e., that humankind had derived from multiple ancestral lines that were isolated from each other. He further linked the different human races with what he believed to be their closest simian relatives. Crookshank wasn't the first polyphyletist but luckily he was one of the last.

Year: 1836

Scientist: George Combe (based on earlier work by Johann Caspar Spurzheim)

Originally published in: Outlines of Phrenology

Now appears in: Victorian Sensation by James A. Secord (Also discussed in Postcards from the Brain Museum by Brian Burrell, and Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus)

Although modern science has tied certain functions to various regions of the brain, we realize there's still so much we don't know. Nineteenth-century phrenologists were a lot more confident — and convinced that they could tell a patient's mental abilities from the shape of his or her skull. "Phrenological organs" of the brain named in this work included (among many others) destructiveness, secretiveness, veneration, hope, wonder, wit and individuality. Spurzheim, the popularizer of phrenology, took many of his ideas from Franz Josef Gall. Gall and Spurzheim started out as colleagues but later had a philosophical split. Though he got wrapped up in the silly notion of skull shapes, Gall was onto something regarding localization of certain brain functions.

Year: 1902

Scientist: L.A. Vaught

Originally published in: Vaught's Practical Character Reader

Now appears in: Phrenology Diagrams in Public Domain Review

Popular confidence in phrenology lasted through the 19th century and into the 20th. At the dawn of the 20th century, Vaught sought to offer practical advice for people wanting to understand human nature, no matter the country. "More than a million observations have been made to confirm the examinations," the author boasted. This pair of illustrations aimed to help women choose good husbands. For the picture on the left, Vaught advised, "Young ladies, indelibly fix this shape of head in your memories. Any man who will make a natural, kind and true husband will have a head in outline from a side view like this." For the picture on the right, Vaught cautioned, "The reason this man is an unreliable husband is because his is very weak in Conjugality and Parental Love and exceedingly strong in Amativeness. Young ladies, beware of such men as husbands." Among that man's likely sins were bigamy and polygamy.

Year: 1744

Scientist: William Smith (not the 19th-century geologist)

Now appears in: Man's Place in Nature by T.H. Huxley

Huxley discredited this image in 1863, and suggested that it really represented a chimpanzee. By the time Huxley wrote, human understanding of the great apes had substantially improved. He quoted from a paper published in 1852 by a new researcher: "opportunities for receiving a knowledge of the [gorilla] have not been wanting; traders having for one hundred years frequented [the Congo region of Africa], and specimens, such as have been brought here within a year, could not have been exhibited without having attracted the attention of the most stupid."

Year: 1915

Scientist: William Diller Matthew

Originally published in: "Climate and Evolution" in Annals N.Y. Acad. Sci.

Now appears in: Man Rises to Parnassus by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Following up a lecture he delivered in 1911, William Diller Matthew published this map showing his hypothesis about the origin and dispersal of human races. From Asia, "Mongols" headed north and into the Americas, "Caucasians" headed into southern and western Europe, "Malays" went eastward and morphed into Australian Aborigines, and "Negroids" aimed for Africa. "Negritos" probably referred to the Khoi-San of southern Africa. Nobody much liked the idea now commonly accepted today: African ancestry for all modern humans.

Year: 1927

Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn

Originally published in: Man Rises to Parnassus

After praising Linnaeus for designating humans as Homo sapiens, Osborn quickly corrected the 18th-century naturalist. "Through anatomical researches among the Asiatics and Africans, we now subdivide Homo sapiens into three or more absolutely distinct stocks, which in zoology would be given the rank of species, if not of genera; these stocks are popularly known as the Caucasian, the Mongolian, and the Negroid." He elaborated, "The spiritual, intellectual, moral, and physical characters which separate these three great human stocks are very profound and ancient. In the author's opinion these three primary stocks diverged from each other during the Age of Mammals, even before the beginning of the Pleistocene or Ice Age. The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian, a may be proved by an examination not only of the brain . . ." Like others before him, Osborn argued that early humans arose in Asia. The caption for this map read, "Theory of Central Asiatic Origin and Dispersal of Mankind. After W.K. Gregory, 1924. Leidy, Matthew, Osborn and Gregory are among those who have favored the theory of an upland or plateau region as the original homeland of man." Two years before Osborn's Parnassus book was published, Raymond Dart had found Australopithecus africanus, a human ancestor in Africa, but few people were taking the find seriously.

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Eighty-seven years after Osborn argued for ancient and profound divisions between "the Caucasian, the Mongolian, and the Negroid" in Man Rises to Parnassus, Nicholas Wade claimed in his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, that human evolution over the past 50,000 years has produced sharp divides between races, with white Europeans best suited genetically to the political and economic institutions now dominating the world. About all Wade's book lacked was evidence which, he insisted, didn't exist purely because academia's thought police had scared scientists away from such "career-destroying" research. In fact, scientists kept investigating genes, race and intelligence in all those years separating Osborn's and Wade's books. What such investigations have found is that the greatest variation in humans exists not between African and other populations but within African populations.

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Year: 1927

Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn

Artist: James Howard McGregor

Originally published in: Man Rises to Parnassus

Titled "The Rise of Character in the Human Face," this collection of busts shows Osborn's conception of human ancestry. Although genetic analysis has shown evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, meaning that all people with ancestry outside of Africa derive something like 2 percent of their DNA from some stretch of the Neanderthal genome, Neanderthals are not direct ancestors. Pithecanthropus erectus (Java Man — the earliest recognized specimen of Homo erectus) is a better ancestral fit, and yet Java Man wasn't a direct ancestor of modern humans either; the Homo erectus individuals who would eventually give rise to us still lived in Africa in Java Man's time. Yet Osborn's inclusion of the these "ancestors" is dwarfed by another gaffe: the inclusion of Piltdown Man.

Year: c. 1930

Originally appeared in: Traveling exhibit on eugenics

Now appears in: Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

If people could breed better pigs, chickens and cows, they could certainly breed better children. Traveling exhibits in the first half of the 20th century showed the simple logic of heritage trumping education and environment. Ironically, some of the main thinkers behind the eugenics movement had troubles of their own. Harry Laughlin, who vigorously campaigned for the sterilization of the unfit, kept secret his own epilepsy. Of course, epilepsy in no way diminishes one's worth as a human being (unless, unfortunately, one is a eugenicist). Another thinker behind the movement, Charles Davenport, confidently predicted that his daughter would — like himself — respect the values of Protestant America, manage expenses responsibly, and prefer nature to art. His daughter turned out to be a bohemian spendthrift. Even worse, she was a bohemian spendthrift who defied her daddy and married a Jew.

Year: 1911

Scientist: Charles Davenport

Originally published in: Heredity in Relation to Eugenics

Now appears in: Davenport's Dream edited by Witkowski and Inglis

Eugenicist Charles Davenport believed that practically everything came down to inheritance: intelligence, artistic ability, wanderlust and good (or bad) morals. To support his argument, he published an abundance of inheritance diagrams showing the relationships between various defects. His caption for this one reads, "This mating illustrates the principle that migraine (M) and paralysis frequently indicate the presence of defective germ cells, as well as normal. In the central mating the paralytic father has an insane brother, an insane niece and 3 feeble-minded grandnephews, besides a grandniece, who died in convulsions." Besides M for migraine, Davenport employed these abbreviations: N for normal, A for alcoholic, E for epileptic, F for feeble-minded, I for insane, D inf. for died in infancy. Also written next to some boxes are apparently less serious traits: "neurotic" and "peculiar." When he produced these diagrams, Davenport likely didn't know that his trusted colleague, Harry Laughlin, suffered from epilepsy, a condition he tried to hide for many years. Eugenicists frequently found the condition grounds for forced sterilization.

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Year: 1921

Originally published by: The Second International Eugenics Congress

Now appears in: Aristotle's Ladder, Darwin's Tree by J. David Archibald

Convening at the American Museum of Natural History, the Second International Eugenics Congress boasted an artfully designed logo. Even now, the Art Nouveau design holds a certain appeal, though the text is a little horrifying. Architects of the eugenics movement felt confident they could distinguish those worthy of breeding from the unfit. Eugenicists such as Charles Davenport imagined that a single gene might be responsible for intelligence. Nearly a century later, scientists aren't so sure. In September 2014, Nature News reported (http://www.nature.com/news/ smart-genes-prove-elusive-1.15858) on a new study exploring the link between genes and intelligence, saying, "One of the largest, most rigorous genetic studies of human cognition has turned up inconclusive findings, and experts concede that they will probably need to scour the genomes of more than 1 million people to confidently identify even a small genetic influence on intelligence and other behavioural traits." Nature went on to explain that the authors of the newly published study had identified 69 genetic variants associated with education level, but found "those variants have about one-twentieth the influence on intelligence as do gene variants linked to other complex traits such as height." In other words, nearly a century of additional research left scientists less certain, not more certain, of which genes affect intelligence and behavior. As for the "harmonious entity" of the 1921 eugenics tree, the artist omitted a few ingredients from its sturdy roots, namely big doses of racial, ethnic, religious, and class biases.

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Year: 1914

Author: George William Hunter

Originally published in: A Civic Biology Presented in Problems

Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark

This diagram of species diversity appeared in an early-20th-century biology textbook. If a similar diagram were published today, the species numbers would certainly be different. Some of the categories and relationships between organisms would be different, too. But the diagram gave a reasonable assessment of biological discoveries up to that time. The entertaining mistake with this image involves a prominent figure who objected to it. A Civic Biology was the textbook assigned to students of Tennessee high school biology teacher John Thomas Scopes. The prosecutor in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial — populist, orator and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan — complained that humans had been lumped into the same category as mammals. Bryan reportedly exclaimed, "There is that book! There is the book they were teaching your children that man was a mammal and so indistinguishable among the mammals that they leave him there with 3,499 other mammals!" The outcome of the trial aside, Bryan's objections to evolution assured him a place in editorial cartoons, usually next to monkeys. In fairness to Bryan, part of what he objected to was a misguided support for the eugenic movement, and Bryan's brand of Christianity included a concern economic justice that hasn't figured so heavily in creationist rhetoric in recent decades.

Year: 1896

Scientist: Cesare Lombroso

Originally published in: The Man of Genius

Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso gained fame for, among other things, alleging that genius was a form of retrograde evolution, and that madness was how biology coped with that genius. Lombroso also asserted that some people are born delinquent, and society should save itself from these hopeless cases by any means necessary. (Lombroso tried convincing Leo Tolstoy of this. Nonplussed, Tolstoy wrote Resurrection to refute the notion.) Besides believing in genius-madness links and born criminals, Lombroso was sure mental attributes could be determined from the appearance of the brain and even the skull. Here he showed some skulls of geniuses, including Volta and Foscolo (inordinately tall) and Kant (exceptional cranial capacity). Given the chance to examine the brain of a contemporary, Carlo Giacomini (who had collected evidence contradicting Lombroso's theory), Lombroso declared victory when he found Giacomini's preserved brain sported a rare feature, a double Rolando sulcus.

Year: 1897

Scientist: Cesare Lombroso

Originally published in: L'uomo delinquente in rapporto all'antropologia, alla giurisprudenza ed alla psichiatria

Image provided by: El Bibliomata (some rights reserved)

Lombroso didn't consider the fairer sex too fair for scrutiny when it came to delinquency. He was sure the female skull could shed as much light on criminal behavior as the male skull. This image, titled "Cranii di donne delinquenti italiane," presented a collection of skulls of female criminals whose deviance Lombroso believed he could identify in skull shape. Interestingly, the skulls shown in profile are all tilted backward rather than shown upright as they would be at the top of a living woman's neck. Maybe the skulls were portrayed this way simply because it was easier to rest them on a flat, level surface, but it was a practice frequently (if unconsciously) followed when showing the skulls of "savage" races.

Year: 1911

Scientists: Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero

Originally published in: "Applications de la nouvelle école au Nord de l'Amérique"

Now appears in: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (Lombroso's work also discussed in "Turin's Criminology Museum" by Alison Abbott in Nature Magazine, January 21, 2010 issue)

Lombroso teamed up with colleague Ferrero to illustrate some unprepossessing facial features that identify born criminals. Unfortunately for many accused, the stigmata he described became "evidence" in their criminal trials. While he pushed for capital punishment for the worst "born criminals," Lombroso believed that other deviants had only some or only slightly troubling criminal characteristics — big ears, little heads, protruding brows — and they should simply be placed in asylums. His genetic-throwback explanation of criminality, genius and deviance was known as atavism.

Year: 1887

Scientist: Cesare Lombroso

Originally published in: L'Homme Criminel

Now appears in: Humankind by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Also discussed in The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould)

Publishing in the late 19th century, Lombroso added photography to his arsenal of criminal identification — along with phrenology, stigmata and eugenics. This series of photos meant to show that abnormal jawlines and off-kilter facial proportions reliably predicted dangerous behavior. A 1911 English translation of his book characterizes the born criminal as, "an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes." That's right. To the skilled observer, even the ears were a dead giveaway.

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Century: 15th

Originally appeared in: Pseudo-Galen, Anatomia

Now appears in: Anatomical Illustrations from 15th-Century England from Public Domain Review

Paleontologist Mark Norell points out that people who lived a few centuries ago, who routinely had to butcher all their own meat, might well outdo modern milquetoasts in identifying animal bones. Those of us who prefer our meat prepackaged at the grocery store, or precooked in the restaurant, would be at a disadvantage. But human skeletons present a different situation. Though human dissection was not necessarily banned by religious authorities, it was still rare. That might explain why so many details are off in this man's skeleton. The errors are especially noticeable around his hips (which look very much like his shoulder blades) and his femurs (which look very much like his humeri). Next to the skeleton is "wound man" who, as the Public Domain Review explains, has been "stabbed, bitten, and wounded by arrows, as well as bludgeoned in the arm and head." (Note the valentine shape of his heart.) Maybe the purpose of the illustration was to offer tips for treating assorted wounds. Fifteenth-century England was a rough place.

Year: 1586

Scientist: Giambattista Della Porta

Originally published in: De Humana Physiognomia

Now appears in: Astrology, Magic, and Alchemy in Art by Matilde Battistini, translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia

Della Porta was a respected naturalist and glittering playwright. Unfortunately, his reputation gave his misguided ideas a long life, including the notion that one's character could be inferred from one's face. He apparently considered this example obstinate.

Year: 1586

Scientist: Giambattista Della Porta

Originally published in: De Humana Physiognomia

Now appears at: Historical Anatomies on the Web (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/ historicalanatomies/porta_home.html)

In his De Humana Physiognomia Libri IIII, Della Porta produced plenty of examples of human-animal similarities, some less noble than others. Della Porta also believed in the doctrine of signatures, that plants resembling certain body parts could cure what ailed them.

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Year: 1586

Scientist: Giambattista Della Porta

Originally published in: De Humana Physiognomia

Now appears at: Giambattista della Porta's De Humana Physiognomia Libri IIII in Public Domain Review

Here are two more examples of Della Porta's physiognomy — facial features shedding light on character — with animal counterparts. The human shown on the bottom might have been realistic, but the the human up top is surely an exaggeration. The belief that a person's facial features and body shape could illuminate his or her character goes back to the time of Ancient Greece. By Della Porta's day, physiognomy had become entwined with another popular pseudoscience: astrology. Some of the greatest astronomers of the Renaissance cast horoscopes for powerful patrons.

Century: Early 19th

Scientist: W. Johnson

Now appears in: Blood and Guts by Roy Porter

For centuries, doctors maintained that health and personality were determined by one's balance of four key bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. (Blech.) If you were sanguine, you were ruddy, lively, energetic and hard working, but maybe impulsive and something less than an intellectual giant. If you were phlegmatic, you were chubby and lazy. If you were choleric (with an excess of yellow bile), you might be thin, jaundiced, mean and stingy. If you were melancholic (with an excess of black bile) you were depressed. Paracelsus scorned this mind set in the 16th century, but it persisted anyway. This engraving showed examples of the different temperaments.

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Year: 1971

Scientist: Raymond Dart

Published in: Early Man by F. Clark Howell

Discussed in: Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin

When Dart described Australopithecus africanus in the 1920s, fellow scientists were slow to listen to him. When he advanced his osteo-donto-keratic (bone-tooth-horn) hypothesis in the 1950s, fellow scientists listened to him perhaps a little too quickly. Dart argued that australopithecines acquired the bones, teeth and horns of animals they hunted, turned those animal bits into weapons, and before long started wielding the weapons against each other. In a 1953 paper titled "The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man," he wrote, "The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices, or their substitutes in formalized religions, and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predacious habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoid relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of carnivores!" Inspired by Dart's hypothesis, playwright Robert Ardrey wrote African Genesis about human depravity, and Stanley Kubrick incorporated a murderous ape in the early scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey . Osteo-dento-keratic culture remained a popular idea in the early 1970s, and made its way into TIME-LIFE's Early Man . More recent studies indicate that australopithecines were largely herbivorous and the "weapons" were likely fashioned by natural weathering and non-human predators.

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Year: 1945

Scientists: Franz Weidenreich and Roy Chapman Andrews

Artist: T.W. Voter

Originally published in: Meet Your Ancestors by Roy Chapman Andrews

In the mid-1940s, Roy Chapman Andrews wrote a book about paleoanthropology aimed at a popular audience, with "The Family Tree of Man" (only part of which appears here) on the inside cover. The book reflected the views of scientists Andrews truly admired, including Henry Fairfield Osborn and (especially) Franz Weidenreich. (Weidenreich's work led to the multiregional theory of human origins, arguing that modern human races evolved independently from Homo erectus with some gene flow in between.) To his credit, Andrews mentioned Africa's possible role as the cradle of humankind, and he expressed reservations about the Piltdown fossils. New finds in science, however, still couldn't override old feelings about race. Andrews summed up the issue with the example of radishes growing at different rates in different types of soil. So, he stated, "the progress of the different races was unequal." It shouldn't take much effort to guess which race Andrews considered the winner. The "giants" Andrews described belonged to the now-discredited genus of Meganthropus and Gigantopithecus. Gigantopithecus is still considered a valid genus, and modern paleontologists surmise that it may actually have been as much as 10 feet tall, though it's not considered a human ancestor.

Year: 1945

Scientist: Roy Chapman Andrews

Artist: T.W. Voter

Originally published in: Meet Your Ancestors by Roy Chapman Andrews

In his popular introduction to paleoanthropology, Roy Chapman Andrews included a chapter titled, "The Man of the Java Jungles" about the hominid originally discovered by Eugène Dubois, named Pithecanthropus erectus and later Homo erectus. Andrews speculated on what Java Man might have thought about contemporary apes had he understood evolution: "Once upon a time, long, long ago, my ancestors were apes, even as you. But now, behold, I have become a man! Not much of a man, I will admit, but still I am definitely human. I walk and run erect; I use my hands, I have a bigger and better brain than you." Java Man is certainly using his hands here, one poking a poor overturned giant tortoise with a stick, the other replicating a B-movie zombie gesture.

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Year: 1965-1970

Artist: Rudolph Zallinger

Originally published in: Early Man by F. Clark Howell

Now appears in: House of Lost Worlds by Richard Conniff

These marching primates are part of a longer series, showing 15 primates on foldout pages in TIME LIFE's Early Man . The Road to Homo Sapiens, as the illustration was named, missed game-changing hominids discovered later, but that's not why the diagram has attracted so much criticism. Clearly no one could foresee the discoveries of fossils such as Lucy and Ardi. This illustration has been criticized for the impression it gives about how evolution works. Nicknamed the March of Progress by Stephen Jay Gould, this portrays a straight-line route from apelike to human, with each successive species a little more "advanced" than the last. In fact, the fossils actually show our family tree to be just that — a tree with plenty of side branches. Robust australopithecines (human chewing machines equipped with thick skulls and molars as big around as nickels or even quarters) shared the planet with members of our own genus, Homo, for about a million years before going extinct. Living from about 4 million to 2 million years ago, gracile australopithecines almost certainly included our direct ancestors, but paleoanthropologists continue to debate which of the gracile australopithecines gave rise to modern humans, and what australopithecines' evolutionary relationships were with each other. Neanderthals, now known to have contributed tiny slivers of DNA to some modern human populations, are depicted here as direct ancestors, which they were not. According to Zallinger's own daughter, Lisa David, Zallinger himself disagreed with the March of Progress approach. He painted each species separately, and worried about how a linear presentation might misrepresent human evolution. But it was a powerful image, readily grasped by the public. Even though Gould disdained the image, it wound up on the covers of some translations of his books. It's the logo of the Leakey Foundation. For that matter, tiny hominids march at the top of this very Web page.

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Year: 1971

Published in: Early Man by F. Clark Howell

"One of the hardest things for a man to do is to think dispassionately about his own ancestry," F. Clark Howell explains in the opening of this chapter. On the following page, after addressing the common misconception that Neanderthals must have been stupid, Howell takes on another fallacy: "Stumbling shamefacedly up from our confrontation with Neanderthal man, we are so grateful to encounter somebody like Cro-Magnon man — somebody who looks like us — that we tend to endow him with more than his share of virtues. This may explain why so many of the paintings and drawings that attempt to re-create the daily life of Cro-Magnon man manage to misrepresent him so. He is all too often depicted as a kindly philosophical fellow with pure motives and noble throughs, who spends a good deal of his time gently instructing bright-eyed boys in the arts of toolmaking and cave painting. This, too, is almost certainly a fallacy. We know absolutely nothing about Cro-Magnon man that would indicate that he was either pure or noble. On the contrary, he was undoubtedly as cruel, as untrustworthy, as emotionally unstable and superstition-ridden as any of the most backward peoples living today — and perhaps a good many of the so-called enlightened ones."

To start, Howell deserves credit for pointing out an unjustified affection for the early modern humans of Europe based on appearance. But at the same time, he commits to the record several other assumptions that won't age well, starting with "looks like us," (as in the reader of Early Man is almost certainly white) and ending with today's "backward peoples" being emotionally stunted. In between are plentiful guesses that all the interesting tasks prehistoric humans performed were done by males.

And then there's the chapter title, which speaks for itself.

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Year: 1926

Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn

Originally published in: Evolution and Religion in Education

Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark

In his biography published in 1940, W.E.B. Du Bois remarked, "I remember once in a museum, coming face to face with a demonstration: a series of skeletons arranged from a little monkey to a tall well-developed white man, with a Negro barely outranking a chimpanzee." Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History wielded enormous influence, not just at AMNH, but in other museums and in textbooks, which adapted AMNH material. A self-described opponent of "miscegenation," Osborn didn't think twice about which race was the very best. Notice the "Ascent of Increasing Intelligence."

Year: 1927

Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn

Originally appeared in: The American Museum of Natural History

Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark

Osborn believed that a considerable gulf separated humans and apes, a gulf dating back to the Eocene Period (between 55 million and 34 million years ago). Though he included all of them in his "family of man," Osborn also believed that human races differed significantly from each other — maybe not as much as people differed from apes, but he left little to the imagination about which race outshone all the others. He even considered Tasmanians living fossils. Note that this diagram, which placed Nordic types confidently at the top of the human hierarchy, also featured Piltdown Man.

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Year: 1930

Scientist: Henry Fairfield Osborn

Published in: "The Discovery of Tertiary Man" in Nature

Osborn recycled displays from the American Museum of Natural History in a paper he published in Nature in 1930. While allowing for the fact that brain-cavity size wasn't a sure-fire predictor of intelligence, the ardent eugenicist nevertheless diagrammed his contention that on average, nonwhites couldn't compete intellectually with whites. Not only did the Veddahs of India, Papuans of Borneo, and native Australians lag behind the cubic-centimeter capacity of the Swiss and the Czechs, the people Osborn viewed as lesser human beings also trailed the Cro-Magnons. Osborn's full diagram (see the expanded image) even placed the Papuans behind Piltdown. You're not doing well when you can't even match a faked fossil.

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Century: Early 20th

Appeared at: American Museum of Natural History

Now appears in: Darwin's Universe: Evolution from A to Z by Richard Milner

For many years, the American Museum of Natural History managed to combine the ladder-like view of evolution with obvious racism. Of course, humans belonged at the top of the ladder — just not all humans. In this assemblage of busts, the tippy-top spot is occupied by nothing less than a Greek god. Below the god, and below all people of European descent, is the sub-Saharan African. Milner writes, "By the 1960s, the outmoded embarrassment was trashed." Good riddance.

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Year: 1929

Scientist: William King Gregory

Originally published in: Our Face from Fish to Man

Now appears in: God — or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age by Constance Areson Clark

To see the ladder of evolution from fish to humans, you didn't have to visit the American Museum of Natural History; the same racism in a lab coat appeared on book covers, too. William King Gregory criticized his old mentor, Henry Fairfield Osborn, for "pithecophobia" — a fear of apes and monkeys in the human family tree. But Gregory (like many people) shared Osborn's views of race. This dust jacket includes six stylized faces and one real one. The Tasmanian face, apparently not quite human in Gregory's view, is from a 19th-century photograph of a woman who may have been the last remaining member of Tasmania's native population. Her name was Trucanini, and at the time her picture was taken, she was one of just five survivors in what could be termed an internment camp, established by the British. All of her companions were so ill that they would soon die. Trucanini died in 1876.

Year: 1878

Scientist: Gustave Le Bon

Now appears in: New appears in: The Pocket Cephalometer, or Compass of Coordinates (https://archive.org/details/ ThePocketCephalometerOr CompassOfCoordinates) and The Godfather of Sexist Pseudoscience (https://narratively.com/ the-godfather-of-sexist- pseudoscience/). Also discussed in "Bad Science and the Unisex Brain" by Lise Eliot in Nature

The paper describing this contraption boasted that it could allow its user to "very rapidly obtain the diverse diameters, angles and profiles of the head, and to reproduce in 3-D any solid figure." Figure out the size of the noggin, the author assumed, and you could pretty much tell what was inside. The author, Le Bon, believed the same thing his peers believed, that race and ethnicity drove intellectual capacity. He warned against any plans that involved colonial powers educating the colonized arguing, for instance, that a European education was "maladapted to the mental constitution of the Hindu." But whereas others devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the cause of establishing racial hierarchies, Le Bon found the time to disparage an additional group: women. When he lugged his portable cephalometer into southern Poland — to test his theory that the blonde, blue-eyed Podhaleans living in the forbidding mountainous region had to be smarter than your average Pole — he didn't even bother measuring the skulls of the local women. (Measurements of 50 manly Podhalean skulls convinced him that they were brainier than Polish peasants and Jews, and in fact on par with Parisian intellectuals. Le Bon happened to be a Parisian intellectual.) But it was a small sample of ancient skulls that convinced him of growing differences in the intellectual capacities of the sexes. Several years before Le Bon wrote about his pocket cephalometer, anatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca unearthed prehistoric skulls from L'Homme Mort Cave, including six female and seven male skulls. Broca found a gender-based difference in size from this small sample, of 99.5 cubic centimeters. The size difference in a larger sample from a modern population found a bigger size difference, ranging from 129.5 to 220.7 cubic centimeters. The conclusion seemed obvious to Le Bon: The skull-size difference had increased over time because men had evolved more. Le Bon railed against France's plans to educate the sexes equally. In 1895, he claimed that females "represent the most inferior forms of human evolution." Cephalometry has been disparaged as pseudoscience since Le Bon's day, but convictions of hard-wired, male-female differences persist in flashy headlines, morning news-magazine shows, and guest lecturers at Google. The technology often employed in the 21st century is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, that are purported to "finally explain the differences between men and women!" In just one example, 2014 MRI study claimed to uncover major differences in how male and female brains are structured, using the metaphor of a subway map. But as Nature points out, "the map omits the vast majority of connections that did not differ between the study's adolescent participants; nor did it control for puberty-related maturation or, once again, for brain size, all of which reduces apparent male-female difference."

Year: 1885

Scientist/artist: John Beddoe

Originally published in: The Races of Britain

Now appears in: The Platypus and the Mermaid by Harriet Ritvo

Never doubting that Europeans toped the hierarchy of humanity, Victorian ethnologists went to work ranking subgroups within respectable whites. Beddoe illustrated what he saw as distinct racial types across Britain, providing illustrated examples. You might be British, but in Beddoe's view, you weren't necessarily white enough. Besides looking for minute divisions within the Saxons, he reckoned the "Gaelic type" originated in Africa (the poor man might have been horrified to learn we all originated in Africa) and speculated that inhabitants of Wales preserved "traces of some Mongoloid race."

Disdain for the Welsh wasn't unique to Beddoe; it persisted well over a century later. In 1997, the BBC reported, Sunday Times columnist A.A. Gill characterized the Welsh as "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls." He also criticized Welsh cuisine, which might be a fair point if it came from someone who wasn't himself from Britain.

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Year: 1874

Photographed in: Mütter Museum, Philadelphia by John Donges (some rights reserved)

Discussed in: Bone Rooms by Samuel Redman

The Mütter Museum preserves medical exhibits from Victorian times. In the late 19th century, the museum acquired the skull collection of Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl. A devout Catholic, Hyrtl believed that the human mind was divinely inspired, and had nothing whatsoever to do with skull shape. That's not entirely true; microcephaly, for instance, causes small skulls and often impedes brain development. But the pseudoscience of phrenology — the belief that one's intellectual ability and character could be discerned from skull shape — fooled plenty of people. Charles Darwin's Beagle travel mate Robert FitzRoy, and naturalist-artist John James Audubon both fell for phrenology's claims. Hyrtl's skull collection was intended to debunk that nonsense. The collection accomplished something else. In a century when people like Ernst Haeckel and Josiah Nott and George Gliddon insisted that vast gulfs separated races, even argued that not all humans qualified as the same species, the Viennese anatomist collected all his skulls entirely from European remains. As visitors to the Mütter Museum can see today, the Victorian aggregation of Caucasian skulls showed remarkable variation. If you were to place several of these skulls in front of Haeckel, Nott or Gliddon, or even in front of an early-20th-century figure like Henry Fairfield Osborn, would he know he was only examining skulls of his fellow whites? Or might he misidentify one or two? So while Hyrtl's reasons for assembling the skull collection weren't entirely scientific, he pushed back on two of the biggest scientific blunders of his day.

Year: 1873

Artist: Charles Briton

Originally prepared for: Mistick Krewe of Comus

Now appears in: Illustrating Carnival: Remembering the Overlooked Artists Behind Early Mardi Gras by Allison Meier in Public Domain Review

None of these images really qualifies as a mistake; each is intended as satire. The artist, Charles Briton, immigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1865, settling in New Orleans as the South was adapting to its loss of the Civil War and, consequently, the end of slavery. Several years later, Briton devoted his artistic talents to the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, designing everything from invitations to floats. The costumes he envisioned for parade marchers perhaps outshone all his other creations. Designed to ridicule Darwin's theory of natural selection, the costumes are hybrids of humans and improbable ancestors, including a scorpion, a coral polyp and a grasshopper. Darwin as a donkey also features in the menagerie. Meier explains, "The full title of this 1873 parade was 'Missing Links to Darwin's Origin of Species,' and its satire bristled against the post-Civil War changes in the South. . . . Among the costume drawings that survive in the Carnival Collection is Darwin himself as an ass, and one of a gorilla playing a banjo, a racist caricature that ridiculed the humanity of black people at a time when Reconstruction amendments were constitutionally affirming their rights."

Year: c. 1500

Originally published in: Hortus Sanitatis

Now appears in: Natural History in Shakespeare's Time by H.W. Seager

Image provided by: Biodiversity Heritage Library (some rights reserved)

H.W. Seager highlighted animals, both real and imagined, as they were understood in the days of Shakespeare. Seager included in his collection this woodcut from Hortus Sanitatis , along with lore from the medieval scholar Bartholomew as related by the London printer Thomas Berthelet: "Of Apes some be like to a Hound in the face, and in the body like to an Ape." In fact, the projecting face of a baboon or mandrill could be said to resemble a dog's, but it's hard to say whether the European notion of a dog-ape was inspired by any real animal.

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