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The beginnings of human palaeontology: prehistory, craniometry and the ‘fossil human races’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2016

MATTHEW R. GOODRUM
MATTHEW R. GOODRUM*
Affiliation:
Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. Email: mgoodrum@vt.edu.
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Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, hominid palaeontology has offered critical information about prehistoric humans and evidence for human evolution. Human fossils discovered at a time when there was growing agreement that humans existed during the Ice Age became especially significant but also controversial. This paper argues that the techniques used to study human fossils from the 1850s to the 1870s and the way that these specimens were interpreted owed much to the anthropological examination of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age skeletons retrieved by archaeologists from prehistoric tombs throughout Europe. What emerged was the idea that a succession of distinct human races, which were identified using techniques such as craniometry, had occupied and migrated into Europe beginning in the Ice Age and continuing into the historic period. This marks a phase in the history of human palaeontology that gradually gave way to a science of palaeoanthropology that viewed hominid fossils more from the perspective of evolutionary theory and hominid phylogeny.

Type
Special Section: Palaeonarratives and Palaeopractices: Excavating and Interpreting Deep History
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 387 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2016 

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