Why is it important that we as scientists study our own history? The aphorism first spoken by the American philosopher George Santayana (and paraphrased by Winston Churchill) is especially true for physical anthropology: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ The subject's past is not a pleasant one. Physical anthropology, the branch of anthropology that considers the structure and evolution of the human body, has been used to justify slavery, condemn criminals by their appearance, limit immigration according to racial origin and, in the case of Nazi Germany, to commit genocide. Over the years, South African physical anthropologists have written a great deal about the peoples of southern Africa and we need to ask if these publications have contributed to our own social heresies. That, of course, will be the task of historians, but we need to be aware that the old problems continue to surface. The publication of the book The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) and the writings of Phillippe Rushton (for example, 1995) have tried to resurrect biological racism by stratifying levels of intelligence by race. They are aberrations that have triggered heated responses from professional physical anthropologists, but in the eyes of the public such ideas do have legitimacy. In the South African context, despite having vanquished the apartheid dragon, we need to understand exactly how much of the racist underpinnings of the policy have become internalised and are still part of us. Academics struggle to find ways to balance the roles of sociology and genetics in their research and the lay public continues to perceive people in neat racial categories. Political attempts to stamp out the old racism against black people in South Africa are ongoing, but sometimes that is matched, either intentionally or unintentionally, by reverse racism. Understanding the past will guide us in how to solve these problems in the future.

Jonathan Marks wrote an extremely valuable book in 2009, Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge, which looks at the intersection between anthropology and science. Despite the title of the book, Marks is not anti-science and contends that he can be a positive critic because anthropology bridges both science and the humanities.