From craniometry to paleogenetics

Abstract

French physical anthropology has persisted, longer than other countries, in measuring skulls and defining "races." This tradition, developed in the 19th c. by the Société d'anthropologie de Paris and Paul Broca, continued until the 1980s with the work of Henri Victor Vallois and his school. The latter maintained ambiguous relations with the German physical anthropologists linked to Nazism, which continued after the Second World War and led to the awarding of the Broca Medal to the German anthropologist Ilse Schwidetzky in 1980. Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel has written a critical but relatively isolated critique of the role and work of Victor Henri Vallois. Although French physical anthropology abandoned craniometry to become "biological" from the 1980s onwards, we can nevertheless find in some current paleogenetic works, irrespective of their interest, the temptation to confuse biology and culture once again.