A historic study that helped quash racist scientific theories almost a century ago has been shown to be false.
Franz Boas, considered by many to be the father of U.S. anthropology, studied the size and shape of the heads of 13,000 European-born immigrants to the United States and their children born in the United States in the early 1900s. At the time, scientific racists were arguing that blacks were inferior to whites because their heads are smaller, and were attempting to classify people according to race based on the shape of their heads.
Dr. Boas concluded that head shape has nothing to do with genetics and that you can't tell someone's race or ethnicity by examining their skull. He reported that children born in the United States of immigrants from Central Italy, Sicily, Poland, Hungary or Scotland had different shaped heads than their parents. The only explanation, he concluded, is that head shape and size are not inherited traits and can't be used to argue that one race or ethnic group is inferior to another.
The results of the study, published in 1912, refuted the work of scientific racists.
But U.S. researchers who recently reanalyzed his findings say Dr. Boas presented only a fraction of his work and that his conclusions were wrong. They say his study actually showed a genetic link to head size and shape and that different ethnicities have different cranial characteristics.
"He was fighting against the scientific racism. He had noble motives, there is no question of that," said Richard Jantz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee and one of the authors of the study.
His graduate student and co-author, Corey Sparks, says he doesn't believe Dr. Boas lied or fudged the data. He was an antiracism crusader, a man who took a courageous stand in an era when many academics believed there was solid physical evidence that blacks were intellectually inferior.
"I think he knew how to present the data to show the things he wanted."
Modern science, including the mapping of the human genome, has shown that very few genetic differences exist between races. But one of those differences, according to Dr. Jantz, is cranial morphology.
That is why forensic anthropologists who do police work in the United States can usually identify whether a skull belonged to a black, a Caucasian or a person of Hispanic origin, Dr. Jantz said. But many critics say this kind of work has no basis in science and cite Dr. Boas's work as proof.
Critics also cited Dr. Boas when they argued that Dr. Jantz and other researchers should not be permitted to study the skull of Kennewick Man, an ancient skeleton discovered in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia River.
Native groups and the U.S. government went to court to stop Dr. Jantz and other researchers from studying the skeleton, but a federal court judge recently sided with the scientists.