Science relies on past discoveries, and research is always building on the work of previous generations.

But in many cases, those discoveries were made by people who weren't perfect, to put it mildly. A lot of fields are grappling with the ethical dilemmas created by earlier researchers.

But the field of forensic anthropology has more reckoning to do than most, thanks to its founder. We’re talking about a man named Aleš Hrdlička. And while he may have been a renowned researcher, trained doctor, and even an FBI consultant, he was also a racist graverobber who turned out to be wrong about almost everything.

His legacy is deeply tainted with the moral failings of how he obtained the data used to make his largest claims. So today, what he got very wrong, and how the field he helped found is now trying to undo the biases of its history. [intro] First up, a content warning: This video will include discussions of racist language and historical events of violence against people of color. Aleš Hrdlička began his career as a physician in the 1890s, and even at the start, he had an obsession with categorizing people into groups, and more to the point, ranking those groups in terms of superiority.

Since he was a white, able-bodied man in the 1800’s, I’m sure you can guess which group he thought was at the top of the heap. During an internship at a mental hospital, he became interested in measuring people in as much detail as possible. This was the 19th-century pseudoscience of anthropometry.

Hrdlička was one of many researchers attempting to use anthropometry to find physical differences between people of different races as a way of explaining assumed differences in intelligence, criminality, physical fitness, and more. And he was so passionate about this research that in 1895, Hrdlička officially left medicine to become a physical anthropologist. To Hrdlička and his contemporaries, physical anthropology meant the study of “man’s” variation through measurement, categorization, and debate.

Hrdlička came to anthropology through medicine, so his early research focused on measurements of people with medical conditions. For example, one of his earliest papers included measurements from a thousand people, grouped by sex and, quote, “form of insanity.” But he also wanted measurements of all kinds of people for comparison, so by the late 1890s, he turned to his colleagues for help acquiring specimens. Which meant cadavers, skeletons, and body parts.

And these letters asking for spare skeletons were not seen as red flags at the time. Back then, It was just accepted that researchers needed research objects …. Including human remains.

Hrdlička’s collection actually helped build his reputation as a dedicated anthropologist. In 1899, he joined an expedition to the southwestern United States led by the American Museum of Natural History, and also worked closely with the US National Museum, which is now known as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He climbed the ranks at the US National Museum and became their first curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology in 1910.

And he traveled all over the world, taking photographs, measurements, and collecting human remains in the name of building the anthropological collection at the museum for research. And his work was revolutionary at the time. For instance, he made several trips to Alaska and Siberia between 1926 and his death in 1943, which led him to theorize that humans migrated from Asia to North America over the Bering Strait.

Which is still the leading theory for how people first reached North America. And, his skills at analyzing human remains had more uses than just pure academics. He consulted with the FBI to help identify human remains in homicide cases, and the techniques he used to identify unknown remains formed the basis of what’s now forensic anthropology.

In 1918, he founded the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and in 1928, he served as President of the Washington Academy of Sciences and helped found the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Which is all to say, he wasn’t a fringe figure in 19th and early 20th-century science. He was well established and highly respected.

But when anthropologists look back on his work today, they see things very differently. Hrdlička’s work was based on deeply flawed assumptions and the dehumanization of the people he studied. Consider his career at the National Museum.

When he arrived, the museum had a collection of about 2,200 skulls. By the end of his career, the museum had amassed more than 30,000 bones and body parts from about 10,000 individuals. And that raises a lot of questions, like: How?

And why? Well, museums have a lot more going on than the exhibits that the public can visit. Behind the scenes, they have warehouses full of specimens collected over decades of research.

Traveling to European and American colonies, collecting examples of wildlife, plants, rocks and minerals, and shipping them to Western universities and museums was really common in 19th-century science. Like, Charles Darwin’s trip aboard the H. M.

S. Beagle in the 1830s collected specimens of 1,500 species, and many of those hadn’t been seen in Europe before. But Hrdlička, like others before him, applied this approach to human remains, and his methods were horrifying.

On Kodiak Island in Alaska, he paid children in the Alutiiq community 10 cents if they brought him human bones. And over several trips to the area, he and a small team dug up about 1,000 graves to send the remains to the Smithsonian. In Peru, he collected more than 3,000 skulls using similar methods.

And in northern Mexico, he went to the site of a government massacre of Yaqui people and decapitated several bodies with a machete. He sent 12 skulls and other remains from the site to a museum in New York in 1902. And what did Hrdlička want to do with this collection?

Well here’s what he wrote in 1918, in Volume 1, Issue 1 of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology: “The paramount scientific object of Physical Anthropology is the gradual completion… of the study of the normal white man living under ordinary conditions.” Then, after understanding non-human primates and human evolution, Hrdlička’s fourth priority for physical anthropology was “the continuous advance in the study of the more primitive human races and their subdivisions.” So… There's a lot to unpack there. Hrdlička started with the assumption that there were three biologically separate human races, which he called white, black, and yellowbrown. He thought everyone on Earth could be categorized into those three races.

And he assumed that those races existed in a hierarchy with white people at the top as the healthiest and most “civilized” group. So if he found some measurement that was different in white people compared to other groups, he would conclude that it was a physical sign of superiority. Then he would claim that people with that physical measurement were destined for higher intelligence or better health than other people.

Or on the flip side, he claimed that people with, say, darker skin, were biologically destined for worse outcomes. That’s That whole idea is called biological determinism, and it is, of course, bogus. Oddly enough, he actually opposed the use of statistical analysis in physical anthropology, so his observations were basically just raw data, and parsing what they meant was pretty subjective.

Plus, he held some wildly inaccurate ideas about how our species evolved. Despite fossil evidence to the contrary, he was adamant that humans evolved from European fossil ancestors and that the evidence coming from Asia and Africa had no bearing on our evolution. Hrdlička had critics in his day– and not just the people who actually wanted to use statistics in their science.

Franz Boas, another prominent 20th-century anthropologist, held views that were almost completely opposite Hrdlička’s. His research on immigrants to the United States and their children began to show that the environment played a huge role in a person’s appearance and health. Now to be clear, Boas wasn’t exactly perfect.

His work mostly focused on white people in America and like Hrdlička, understanding other cultures was further down on his priority list. But Boas’ rejection of biological race was relatively new and unusual in anthropology at the time. And, socially and culturally, race remained a major force in the lives of Americans.

So when politicians had questions about race, they didn’t go to the guy who said race isn’t real. They went to the guy with a reputation as an expert in racial difference: Ales Hrdlička. Not only did he traumatize Indigenous communities and set physical anthropology on a path full of bias and blind spots, Hrdlička also had a say in U.

S. federal policy on immigration and even interracial marriage. So it’s fair to say that Hrdlička cast a long, dark shadow on the science of anthropology Anthropologists have reckoned with his legacy for decades, and especially in the last few years, they’ve taken action to address it. For one thing, the term physical anthropology is almost entirely defunct, because it’s so closely tied to the flawed idea of quantifying racial difference.

Today, anthropologists who study human evolution make use of way more information than just the dimensions of the body. They take into account genetics, nutrition, environmental science, infectious disease, behavior, and they definitely use statistics to analyze all that data. In 2022, the organization that Hrdlička founded changed its name to the American Association of Biological Anthropology.

And meanwhile, institutions like the Smithsonian Natural History Museum have a new openness to repatriation, meaning returning the human remains in their collections to their communities. Federal law in the U. S. requires that museums inform Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian communities about the human remains in their collections that could be repatriated.

So in the last 30 years, the Smithsonian has returned 4,068 sets of remains, including 4 brains. About 2,000 more sets of remains are in the process of being returned. But the law doesn’t cover returning remains to communities outside the US, like the Mexican or Peruvian remains that Hrdlička collected.

And while many say they will return remains upon request, Often these communities have no idea that they even exist. So thousands of human remains, including over 250 brains, are still held by the Smithsonian. And to make matters even more complicated, the Smithsonian collection of human remains has been really important in the development of forensic anthropology.

Identifying people by their remains is a necessary skill after tragedies where they are otherwise unrecognizable. That could be when a person goes missing and their body is found far too late, or after a mass casualty event like an earthquake or terrorist attack. Forensic anthropologists’ work can even provide new insights into the historical events that led to the creation of these unethical collections.

Modern forensic analysis of the 12 skulls that Hrdlička collected in Mexico revealed the brutality of the massacre, and the remains were repatriated, baptized, and buried with a warriors’ honor guard in 2009. Forensic anthropology is still criticized for its reliance on race and ancestry. Some in the field are pushing for new methods that take a more nuanced view of variation between populations.

They say that the Hrdličkian view of ancestry is too rigid – but it has been tough to shake off entirely. And that speaks to the size of his impact on anthropology. He founded this entire subfield, and that’s not something we can ignore.

Instead, today’s biological anthropologists are doing the hard work of facing Hrdlička’s legacy head on. And that means acknowledging his many, many flaws, and the ways they’re embedded in the field, and then finding ways to move forward. Like by making room for more people of all backgrounds to become biological anthropologists, and sharing cultural perspectives that often go unrecognized.

Because if we want to understand ourselves as a species, our research will be stronger if we all have a seat at the table. So… Hey, thanks for sticking with us through this whole sordid tale. This one was not a super advertiser-friendly topic to delve into, but it’s a story worth telling.

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