A racist scientist built a collection of human skulls. Should we still study them?

[NNadir]

This a news item from a recent issue of Science: A racist scientist built a collection of human skulls. Should we still study them? (Lizzie Wade, Science July 8, 2018).

I'm not sure if it's open sourced. A pop up appeared, and I just logged in using my AAAS membership.

Some excerpts:

They were buried on a plantation just outside Havana. Likely few, if any, thought of the place as home. Most apparently grew up in West Africa, surrounded by family and friends. The exact paths that led to each of them being ripped from those communities and sold into bondage across the sea cannot be retraced. We don’t know their names and we don’t know their stories because in their new world of enslavement those truths didn’t matter to people with the power to write history. All we can tentatively say: They were 51 of nearly 5 million enslaved Africans brought to Caribbean ports and forced to labor in the islands’ sugar and coffee fields for the profit of Europeans.

Nor do we know how or when the 51 died. Perhaps they succumbed to disease, or were killed through overwork or by a more explicit act of violence.

What we do know about the 51 begins only with a gruesome postscript: In 1840, a Cuban doctor named José Rodriguez Cisneros dug up their bodies, removed their heads, and shipped their skulls to Philadelphia.

He did so at the request of Samuel Morton, a doctor, anatomist, and the first physical anthropologist in the United States, who was building a collection of crania to study racial differences. And thus the skulls of the 51 were turned into objects to be measured and weighed, filled with lead shot, and measured again.

Morton, who was white, used the skulls of the 51—as he did all of those in his collection—to define the racial categories and hierarchies still etched into our world today. After his death in 1851, his collection continued to be studied, added to, and displayed.

In the 1980s, the skulls, now at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, began to be studied again, this time by anthropologists with ideas very different from Morton’s. They knew that society, not biology, defines race. They treated the skulls as representatives of one diverse but united human family, beautiful and fascinating in their variation. They also used the history of the Morton collection to expose the evils of racism and slavery, sometimes using skulls in lectures and exhibits on those topics.

Then, in summer 2020, the history of racial injustice in the United States—built partly on the foundation of science like Morton’s—boiled over into protests. The racial awakening extended to the Morton collection: Academics and community activists argued that the collection and its use perpetuate injustice because no one in the collection had wanted to be there, and because scientists, not descendants, control the skulls’ fate...

...WHEN THE SKULLS of the 51 were sent to Morton, he was already the world’s leading skull collector. Active in the esteemed Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Morton had an extensive network of scientifically minded contacts who responded enthusiastically to his requests to send skulls from every corner of the world. Rodriguez Cisneros wrote that he “procure[d] 50 pure rare African skulls” for Morton’s collection. The doctor claimed the Africans had recently been brought to Cuba, but some skulls may have belonged to enslaved Africans born on the island, or to Indigenous Taíno people, who were also enslaved in Cuba at the time. (Whether Rodriguez Cisneros sent 53 skulls or 51 is also somewhat unclear.)...

...Morton sought a diverse collection of skulls because his life’s work was to measure and compare the cranial features of what he considered the human races. Like many scientists of his time, Morton delineated five races: Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Malay, and Ethiopian. Their geographic origins are jumbled to modern eyes, showing how social categories determine race. For example, “Caucasians” lived from Europe to India; the Indigenous people of northern Canada and Greenland were considered “Mongolian,” like the people in East Asia; and the “Ethiopian” race included people from sub-Saharan Africa and Australia.

Morton thought skulls could reveal telltale differences among those races. When a skull arrived, he carefully inked a catalog number on its forehead and affixed a label identifying its race; many of the 51 still bear the words “Negro, born in Africa.”...

The article contains a quote from one of the three great Americans who started the all too slow process, obviously still uncompleted, of freeing the United States from virulent racism, at that time, in it's most vicious form, human slavery, Frederick Douglass. (The other two would be Lincoln and Grant, who defined their contributions in the political and military/political field, whereas Douglass defined it in the moral sphere.)

"It is strange that there should arise a phalanx of learned men—speaking in the name of science—to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind in one brotherhood." Fredrick Douglass

Interesting article, I think.

Have a nice weekend.

[Warpy]

1. He looked at bones and drew all the wrong conclusions

as so many men of his day did because they were desperate to prove their right to enslave others.

These days we have better tools. We can answer questions about where they came from, whether they have living relatives or descendants, what they ate, some of the illnesses they suffered from, and how some of them died. You know, human questions about the people who once used those bones.

We're past the stage of looking at them as trophies, I hope.

[sarge43]

4. Also have a post mortem forensic artist return their faces to them.

As you say, human questions, who were they.

[Warpy]

5. That is computerized now

so the process is easier and quicker. I'd say they all need their faces restored.

That's certainly a part of who these people were.

[mopinko]

2. sounds like it's of dubious scientific value, anyway.

like the mention of the 3 'straight from africa' that likely weren't.
no doubt those who sold to him knew what he wanted to hear.

tainted. just tainted.

[rickyhall]

3. The Nazi designed jets and rockets, we used their designs.

I think we used some of Mengele's research.

[Warpy]

6. That's the dirtiest secret of all

Mengele was a quack and a sadist, but there were a few nuggets of information among all his hideous crimes against people.

And yes, medicine has used those.

[NNadir]

8. Mengele had nothing to do with Nazi Rocket Science. The slave labor camp for rockets was at...

...Peenemünde, a relatively small camp, about 2000 human slaves, about 600 of whom were killed in an allied raid on the facility.

Werner Braun, who headed the American Apollo program was only interviewed about the slaves he employed there once on US TV, said it was "terrible," then was allowed to change the subject.

It should not be said that American and Soviet, nor for that matter, the British were ignorant of rocket technology. They were not. The first liquid fuel rocket ever launched was launched by the American physicist Robert Goddard in 1926.

American used rockets launched from aircraft extensively during the Second World War, mostly however in the Pacific theater.

What Von Braun, and his fellow German scientists, brought to the US space program largely concerned guidance systems and scale.

Mengele was confined to horrific "medical" experiments, and it is true, after some significant ethical wrangling, some data on hypothermia generated by the Nazis using Russian Prisoners of War (who were killed by the "experiments," was evaluated for modern use.

[Loki Liesmith]

7. Sure

If the collection of skulls is properly curated, then use them.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Consider CAT scanning them at high resolution, and repatriating them.

The measurements (as opposed to the skulls themselves) may have some utility as a statistical base, but even then, it sounds like the collection and sorting was a bit sloppy, which limits the confidence in the data.

Personally, I don't care what happens to my bones after I die, but it matters greatly to some, so try to do the right thing.

[NNadir]

10. I would guess that the morphological conditions of the skulls might give some insight...

...to the health of these subjects, and by extension, insight to the conditions under which they lived. It should be fairly straight forward to date the individuals with C-14.

Of most interest, and I believe this is a focus, is genetic information.

The Taino suffered tremendously under Spanish rule, both from disease and maltreatment. My general impression, garnered somewhere from long ago, is that they are an extinct people.

Most of the genetic geographical origins stuff is nonsense in my opinion, 23 and me, etc., since these are really about building databases for pharmaceutical research and not for telling you if a member of Anne Boleyn's family was your great, great, great, great grandmother but for serious full scanning of genomes of people dead for many centuries has resulted in considerable insight. I think I may have written a few posts here on this topic from general reading; I no longer remember writing all the stuff I wrote when going through my journal.

While the "collection" of these remains did not meet high standards of scientific rigor, I'm not sure that the information in them is entirely useless.

Like you, I really don't care all that much about my mortal remains. My biggest concern would be that I wouldn't want the phosphorous in my bones sequestered, as in a grave. I'm very concerned about the fate of phosphorous for future generations.

I always wanted to be subject to excarnation, say at a body farm, but my family isn't comfortable with that. The default is cremation and scattering on land at some distance away from bodies of water.

Any part of my dead flesh that is of scientific, medical, or heuristic interest, would be fine to donate and use, tumors, if present, etc.

These poor people had no choice in what became of their bones, but what they can tell us about history may prevent similar injustices.

We all feel great pain in discovering how prevalent racism is in this country in particular, but I hope, perhaps naively, that information can lead us back to a better world.

I have been to the museum at Penn, where several mummies are in glass cases. They all have posted statements that the viewer is in the presence of human remains, and therefore appropriate respect is required.