---
title: "History of anthropometry"
chunk: 5/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anthropometry"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:27.146887+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Caucasoid characterized by a tall dolichocephalic skull, receded zygomas, large brow ridge and projecting-narrow nasal apertures.
Negroid characterized by a short dolichocephalic skull, receded zygomas and wide nasal apertures.
Mongoloid characterized by a medium brachycephalic skull, projecting zygomas, small brow ridge and small nasal apertures.
Ripley's The Races of Europe was rewritten in 1939 by Harvard physical anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Coon, a 20th-century craniofacial anthropometrist, used the technique for his The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1962). Because of the inconsistencies in the old three-part system (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid), Coon adopted a five-part scheme. He defined "Caucasoid" as a pattern of skull measurements and other phenotypical characteristics typical of populations in Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, North Africa, and Northeast Africa (Ethiopia, and Somalia). He discarded the term "Negroid" as misleading since it implies skin tone, which is found at low latitudes around the globe and is a product of adaptation, and defined skulls typical of sub-Saharan Africa as "Congoid" and those of Southern Africa as "Capoid". Finally, he split "Australoid" from "Mongoloid" along a line roughly similar to the modern distinction between sinodonts in the north and sundadonts in the south. He argued that these races had developed independently of each other over the past half-million years, developing into Homo Sapiens at different periods of time, resulting in different levels of civilization. This raised considerable controversy and led the American Anthropological Association to reject his approach without mentioning him by name.
In The Races of Europe (1939) Coon classified Caucasoids into racial sub-groups named after regions or archaeological sites such as Brünn, Borreby, Alpine, Ladogan, East Baltic, Neo-Danubian, Lappish, Mediterranean, Atlanto-Mediterranean, Irano-Afghan, Nordic, Hallstatt, Keltic, Tronder, Dinaric, Noric and Armenoid. This typological view of race, however, was starting to be seen as out-of-date at the time of publication. Coon eventually resigned from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, while some of his other works were discounted because he would not agree with the evidence brought forward by Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leonard Lieberman and others.
The concept of biologically distinct races has been rendered obsolete by modern genetics. Different methods of categorizing humans yield different groups, making them non-concordant. Neither will the craniofacial method pin-point geographic origins reliably, due to variation in skulls within a geographic region. About one-third of "white" Americans have detectable African DNA markers, and about five percent of "black" Americans have no detectable "negroid" traits at all, craniofacial or genetic. Given three Americans who self-identify and are socially accepted as white, black and Hispanic, and given that they have precisely the same Afro-European mix of ancestries (one African great-grandparent), there is no objective test that will identify their group membership without an interview.

== In popular culture ==
The Bertillon system was used by the detectives in Caleb Carr's  novel The Alienist.

== See also ==
Anthropometry – Measurement of the human individual
Anthropometric history – Study of the history of human height and weight
Body roundness index – Body scale based on waist circumference and height
Historical race concepts – Obsolete definitions of racial groups
Scientific racism – Pseudoscientific justification for racism

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Anthropometric Survey of Army Personnel: Methods and Summary Statistics 1988 Archived 2022-06-21 at the Wayback Machine
ISO 7250: Basic human body measurements for technological design, International Organization for Standardization, 1998.
ISO 8559: Garment construction and anthropometric surveys — Body dimensions, International Organization for Standardization, 1989.
ISO 15535: General requirements for establishing anthropometric databases, International Organization for Standardization, 2000.
ISO 15537: Principles for selecting and using test persons for testing anthropometric aspects of industrial products and designs, International Organization for Standardization, 2003.
ISO 20685: 3-D scanning methodologies for internationally compatible anthropometric databases, International Organization for Standardization, 2005.
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Anthropometry Procedures Manual. CDC: Atlanta, USA; 2007.
Komlos, John (2010). "Anthropometric History: an Overview of a Quarter Century of Research" (PDF). Anthropologischer Anzeiger. 67 (4): 341–56. doi:10.1127/0003-5548/2009/0027. PMID 20440956. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2015-09-29.
Folia Anthropologica: tudományos és módszertani folyóirat. 9: 5–17. ISSN 1786-5654
Pheasant, Stephen (1986). Bodyspace: anthropometry, ergonomics, and design. London; Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-85066-352-5. (A classic review of human body sizes.)
Stewart A. "Kinanthropometry and body composition: A natural home for three dimensional photonic scanning". Journal of Sports Sciences, March 2010; 28(5): 455–457.