---
title: "History of anthropometry"
chunk: 4/5
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"
---

In Crania Americana Morton claimed that Caucasians had the biggest brains, averaging 87 cubic inches, Indians were in the middle with an average of 82 cubic inches and Negroes had the smallest brains with an average of 78 cubic inches. In 1873 Paul Broca (1824–1880) found the same pattern described by Samuel Morton's Crania Americana by weighing brains at autopsy. Other historical studies alleging a Black–White difference in brain size include Bean (1906), Mall, (1909), Pearl, (1934) and Vint (1934). But in Germany Rudolf Virchow's study led him to denounce "Nordic mysticism" in the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe. Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated in the same congress that the people of Europe, be them German, Italian, English or French, belonged to a "mixture of various races," furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology" led to "struggle against any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race". Virchow later rejected measure of skulls as legitimate means of taxonomy. Paul Kretschmer quoted an 1892 discussion with him concerning these criticisms, also citing Aurel von Törok's 1895 work, who basically proclaimed the failure of craniometry.
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) claimed Samuel Morton had fudged data and "overpacked" the skulls. A subsequent study by John Michael concluded that "[c]ontrary to Gould's interpretation... Morton's research was conducted with integrity." In 2011 physical anthropologists at the university of, which owns Morton's collection, published a study that concluded that "Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould."  They identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in Morton's reports, finding that in only 2% of cases did Morton's measurements differ significantly from their own and that these errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton. Difference in brain size, however, does not necessarily imply differences in intelligence: women tend to have smaller brains than men yet have more neural complexity and loading in certain areas of the brain. This claim has been criticized by, among others, John S. Michael, who reported in 1988 that Morton's analysis was "conducted with integrity" while Gould's criticism was "mistaken".
Similar claims were previously made by Ho et al. (1980), who measured 1,261 brains at autopsy, and Beals et al. (1984), who measured approximately 20,000 skulls, finding the same East Asian → European → African pattern but warning against using the findings as indicative of racial traits, "If one merely lists such means by geographical region or race, causes of similarity by genogroup and ecotype are hopelessly confounded". Rushton's findings have been criticized for confusing African-Americans with equatorial Africans, who generally have smaller craniums as people from hot climates often have slightly smaller crania. He also compared equatorial Africans from the poorest and least educated areas of Africa with Asians from the wealthiest, most educated areas and colder climates. According to Z. Z. Cernovsky Rushton's own study shows that the average cranial capacity of North American blacks is similar to that of Caucasians from comparable climatic zones, though a previous work by Rushton showed appreciable differences in cranial capacity between North Americans of different race. This is consistent with the findings of Z. Z. Cernovsky that people from different climates tend to have minor differences in brain size.

=== Race, identity and cranio-facial description ===

Observable craniofacial differences included: head shape (mesocephalic, brachycephalic, dolichocephalic) breadth of nasal aperture, nasal root height, sagittal crest appearance, jaw thickness, brow ridge size and forehead slope. Using this skull-based categorization, German philosopher Christoph Meiners in his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785) identified three racial groups: