Anthropometry, Genetics and Racial History

Abstract

ferent branches of anthropology, but stem from the evaluation of both assets and liabilities in the relevant data. The major asset of the cultural historian is that the past record of a culture is a residue of innumerable individual acts of learning. This behavior has enough cohesion and continuity so that he can often identify stylistic or linguistic complexes over considerable space and time. His major liabilities are usually gaps in historical sequences, scarcity or unreliability of the evidence, or poor control of chronology. These problems also bedevil the physical anthropologist in historical studies, but he has additional difficulties which have seldom been fully presented to anthropologists at large. As we shall see, most of these special perplexities are related to human genetics. Of course, no scholar has reconstructed the somatic evolution of a sizable human sample in complete isolation from cultural evidence. But when the cultural historian performs the reciprocal task of testing his reconstructions of the past against somatological data, he may profit from an examination of the methods used in physical anthropology, its theoretical foundations, and its effectiveness as an historical instrument. Since man procreates by sexual reproduction and transmits most of his physical characteristics by Mendelian heredity, the historical interpreta-ion of somatic data must rest on genetic grounds wherever possible. Some of the requisite genetic theory is discussed here. Nowadays, we rely only in part on traditional anthropometry in the reconstruction of racial history. This system of somatic measurements still encompasses anatomical features whose heredity is poorly understood. Instead, most of the literature is engrossed in traits whose genetic basis is at least partly established, such as blood groups, abnormal varieties of hemoglobin, the taster phenomenon, and mid-phalangeal hair. When such hereditary traits are translated into allelic or chromosomal frequencies, one can produce a world-wide picture of the genetic diversity of mankind. The most inclusive-effort in this field so far is the work of Mourant