Understanding race and human variation: Why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race
Stephen Ousley, Richard Jantz, Donna Freid
American forensic anthropologists uncritically accepted the biological race concept from classic physical anthropology and applied it to methods of human identification. Why and how the biological race concept might work in forensic anthropology was contemplated by Sauer (Soc Sci Med 34 [1992] 107-111), who hypothesized that American forensic anthropologists are good at what they do because of a concordance between social race and skeletal morphology in American whites and blacks. However, Sauer also stressed that this concordance did not validate the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology that there are a relatively small number of discrete types of human beings. Results from Howells ... and others using craniometric and molecular data show strong geographic patterning of human variation despite overlap in their distributions. ... In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology. Further, our results show that humans can be accurately classified into geographic origin using craniometrics even though there is overlap among groups.
In other words, for many decades, when somebody finds a skeleton buried in a shallow grave in the woods, the cops call in a forensic anthropologist from a university, who examines the bones and reports back something like: "Male, black, age between 20 and 30," which is a big help for the cops.
The point is that despite all that sophomore silliness that cultural anthropologists teach about how race doesn't exist, the forensic anthropologists usually don't have much trouble figuring out which Race box to check on the "Missing Person" ID form. In fact, they are now so good at it, that they can often tell a Swede from a Greek or whatever from the shape of the skull, supposedly "contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology," (although not my partly inbred extended family model).
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What's more, it's always interesting how some people attempt to assert that modern notions of race and race differences are somehow, magically, the product of European colonialism.
Of course ignoring the attitudes of the rest of the world in ages past can certainly help those types keep their heads firmly tucked in the dirt...
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