[Race as Global Data Stream: Anthropological Research in 20th Century Hamburg as a Vantage Point for a Data History of Racialization]. / "Rasse" als globaler Datenstrom: Die Hamburger Anthropologie des 20. Jahrhunderts als Ausgangspunkt einer Datengeschichte der Rassifizierung.

This article explores anthropological research conducted in Hamburg during the 20th century and demonstrates how historically specific discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme) shaped concepts of race and their subsequent use in politics. To this end, this study examines three paradigms within the history of German anthropology in terms of their underlying inscription technique: physical anthropology/loose-leaf collection, "Erblehre"/card index, and population genetics/electronic data processing. By outlining a data history of racialization, this article avoids the ontological pitfalls of recent debates about the category of race.

Birth of Homo erectus.

Eugène Dubois was the pioneer of human origins research in South-East Asia, specifically on two of the islands, Sumatra and Java, now included in Indonesia. Dubois was a polymath, whose research interests embraced encephalization and hydrology as well as paleoanthropology. His interpretations of the hominin fossil evidence he collected, which he eventually assigned to Pithecanthropus erectus, changed over the years, and he evidently felt defensive about those interpretations, but in his 1894 paper he presents cogent reasons for his decision. The taxon he introduced is still recognized, and while it is no longer seen as "the" link between fossil apes and modern humans, it is currently one of the longest surviving hominin taxa.

Birth of primate comparative anatomy.

In 1698, a creature with a perplexing mix of human and "ape" features died in London. Brought back to England by merchants who had acquired it during a trading mission to West Africa, it attracted the attention of the Royal Society, and after the death of what we now know was a juvenile chimpanzee, Edward Tyson, a distinguished physician/anatomist, was commissioned to undertake its dissection. Tyson, who was assisted by William Cowper, prepared a detailed written and graphic description of their meticulous dissection, and this forms the major part of his 1699 publication Orang-outang sive Homo sylvestris: or The Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. Tyson records the many ways his "pygmie" resembled, and differed from, modern humans, including acute assessments of its brain and pelvic anatomy. Tyson's monograph is a text-book example of the comparative method. He, and it, deserve more recognition.

The masks of Lorenzo Tenchini: their anatomy and surgical/bioengineering clues.

An academic, anatomist, and Lombrosian psychiatrist active at the University of Parma in Italy at the end of the 19th century, Lorenzo Tenchini produced ceroplastic-like masks that are unique in the anatomical Western context. These were prepared from 1885 to 1893 with the aim of 'cataloguing' the behaviour of prison inmates and psychiatric patients based on their facial surface anatomy. Due to the lack of any reference to the procedure used to prepare the masks, studies were undertaken by our group using X-ray scans, infrared spectroscopy, bioptic sampling, and microscopy analysis of the mask constituents. Results showed that the masks were stratified structures including plaster, cotton gauze/human epidermis, and wax, leading to a fabrication procedure reminiscent of 'additive layer manufacturing'. Differences in the depths of these layers were observed in relation to the facial contours, suggesting an attempt to reproduce, at least partially, the three-dimensional features of the facial soft tissues. We conclude the Tenchini masks are the first historical antecedent of the experimental method for face reconstruction used in the early 2000s to test the feasibility of transferring a complete strip of face and scalp from a deceased donor to a living recipient, in preparation for a complete face transplant. In addition, the layering procedure adopted conceptually mimics that developed only in the late 20th century for computer-aided rapid prototyping, and recently applied to bioengineering with biomaterials for a number of human structures including parts of the skull and face. Finally, the masks are a relevant example of mixed ceroplastic-cutaneous preparations in the history of anatomical research for clinical purposes.

Skeletal evidence for violent trauma from the bronze age Qijia culture (2,300-1,500 BCE), Gansu Province, China.

This research explores how social and environmental factors may have contributed to conflict during the early Bronze Age in Northwest China by analyzing violent trauma on human skeletal remains from a cemetery of the Qijia culture (2300-1500 BCE). The Qijia culture existed during a period of dramatic social, technological, and environmental change, though minimal research has been conducted on how these factors may have contributed to violence within the area of the Qijia and other contemporaneous material cultures. An osteological assessment was conducted on 361 individuals (n = 241 adults, n = 120 non-adults) that were excavated from the Mogou site, Lintan County, Gansu, China. Injuries indicative of violence, including sharp- and blunt-force trauma that was sustained ante- or peri-mortem, were identified, and the patterns of trauma were analysed. Violent injuries were found on 8.58% (n = 31/361) of individuals, primarily adult males. No evidence of trauma was found on infants or children. Cranial trauma was found on 11.8% (n = 23/195) of the adult individuals examined. Of these, 43.5% (n = 10/23) presented with severe peri-mortem craniofacial trauma. The high rate of perimortem injuries and their locations indicate lethal intent. This lethality, in addition to the fact that individuals with trauma were predominantly male, suggest intergroup violence such as raiding, warfare, or feuding. Both social and environmental factors may have contributed to this conflict in the TaoRiver Valley, though future systematic archaeological and paleoenvironmental data will be needed to disentangle the many potential causal factors.

Women's experiences in early physical anthropology.

At the establishment of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1930, women comprised 2.4% of the total membership, and 9.7% a decade later. By 2014 ~70% of members were women. Despite these numbers, there are continued gender disparities within the discipline. While there is considerable interest in promoting equity, there is little documentation of the historical experiences of female anthropologists. This article introduces the women active in the discipline during the first decade of the Association, compiles descriptions of their experiences related to their treatment based on gender, and examines these historical perspectives in conjunction with documented trends of continuing gender disparities. A pattern is evident for these early anthropologists of receiving personal and financial discouragement during their education; experiencing discrimination in hiring, promotion, and pay; studying women and children as entrée into professional work; working within the federal government or military; leaving anthropology early in their careers; having their work credited to their male colleagues; experiencing additional limitations if they married; and outwardly downplaying their own experiences of sexism. This pattern is echoed in the experiences of female anthropologists today.

The Human Wallace Line: Racial Science and Political Afterlife.

This paper examines racial science and its political uses in Southeast Asia. It follows several anthropologists who travelled to east Nusa Tenggara (the Timor Archipelago, including the islands of Timor, Flores and Sumba), where Alfred Russel Wallace had drawn a dividing line between the races of the east and the west of the archipelago. These medically trained anthropologists aimed to find out if the Wallace Line could be more precisely defined with measurements of the human body. The paper shows how anthropologists failed to find definite markers to quantify the difference between Malay and Papuan/Melanesian. This, however, did not diminish the conceptual power of the Wallace Line, as the idea of a boundary between Malays and Papuans was taken up in the political arena during the West New Guinea dispute and was employed as a political tool by all parties involved. It shows how colonial and racial concepts can be appropriated by local actors and dismissed or emphasised depending on political perspectives.

All things bleak and bare beneath a brazen sky: practice and place in the analysis of Australopithecus.

The fossilized primate skull known as the Taungs Baby, discovered in South Africa, was put forward in 1925 as a controversial 'missing link' between humans and apes. This essay examines the controversy generated by the fossil, with a focus on practice and the circulation of material objects. Viewing the Taungs story from this perspective provides a new outlook on debates, one that suggests that attention to the importance of place, particularly the ways that specific localities shape scientific practices, is crucial to understanding such controversies. During the 1920s, the fossil itself did not move or circulate from its South African location, a fact that raised methodological concerns in understanding its significance and drew immense criticism from a range of experts. Examining the criticisms regarding the fossil's failure to circulate draws attention to the importance of centers of accumulation in the analysis of hominid fossils. Diverging from existing histories that primarily emphasize the role of theory in paleoanthropological debates, then, this article argues that scientific practice played an important role in the Taungs fossil controversy. Examining this dimension of the debates has broader implications for revealing the underlying imperial assumptions that guided hominid paleontology during the early twentieth century.

The Face as Diversity: What Was the Medical-Scientific Value of Lombrosian Morphoanthropology?

The face as an element of diversity. The ugliness of a face or a body and deformities were considered in 1800 as symbols of atavism, regression to being primates, or expression of inferior beings. The Italian physician Cesare Lombroso was the author of the concept of morphoanthropology, according to which the human being is judged on the basis of his or her physical connotations. The ugly person, with particular marks on his or her face and body, would be brought in as a criminal. Time has dissolved the value of Lombrosian theories, and scientific research has highlighted the influence of various factors in the genesis of crime. Genetic, biological, socioenvironmental factors, regulated by neurophysiology, which adds the effect of antagonism between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic cortex, explain the tendency to commit crime.

The promise of primatology fulfilled?

In 1972, Sherwood Washburn, one of the forerunners of biological anthropology, gave an invited address during the 4th Congress of the International Primatological Society in Portland, Oregon, in which he expounded his vision for the field of primatology. His address was published the following year in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and titled: "The promise of primatology." In this centennial commentary, we revisit Washburn's "promise", 45 years on. His address and article discuss the constraints acting on the field, including a positioning of the discipline across different kinds of university departments, and within the social sciences, which he viewed as a mixed blessing. Prescient aspects of Washburn's address include a focus on the need to study communication multimodally, and a hope that the study of mechanisms would become foundational within the field. We discuss new promising aspects of primatology, focusing on technological advances in a number of areas highlighted by Washburn that have ushered in new eras of research, and the increasingly large number of long-term field sites, which see the discipline well-set for new developmental and longitudinal studies. We find much to admire in Washburn's keen foresight, and natural intuition. Washburn hoped that primatology would repudiate the notion that "the social should be studied without reference to the biological." In this regard, we consider much of Washburn's promise fulfilled.

A sort of revolution: Systematics and physical anthropology in the 20th century.

During the first four decades of the 20th century, a system of ideas about the evolution and systematics of humans and other primates coalesced around the work of George Gaylord Simpson and W. E. Le Gros Clark. Buttressed by the "new physical anthropology" of the 1950s, that system provided an authoritative model-a disciplinary matrix or paradigm-for the practice of that aspect of biological anthropology. The Simpson-Le Gros Clark synthesis began to unravel in the 1960s and collapsed in the 1970s under the onslaught of cladistic systematics. The cladistic "revolution" resembles a paradigm shift of the sort proposed by Thomas Kuhn because it was driven, not by new biological discoveries or theories, but by a change in aesthetics.

Physical anthropology in 1918 and the founding of the U.S. journal.

In 1918, the first issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology was prepared and distributed by Ales Hrdlicka, the Curator of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. This was a singular act, both in the general and specific sense. It was the first journal of physical anthropology published in the United States, and it was a sole effort by Hrdlicka, who was committed to promoting and recognizing physical anthropology as a new science in America. On this 100th anniversary of the founding of the journal, Hrdlicka's efforts were successful: physical/biological anthropology is a strong and timely discipline that represents a major area of scientific research today.