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Negroid affinities in ancient Greece???
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by ausar: [QB] Study Suggests Genetics Shape Skulls By BILL BERGSTROM Associated Press Writer PHILADELPHIA (AP)--Nearly a century ago, Franz Boas, the man known as the founder of modern anthropology, launched a study of cranial measurements of 13,000 people and concluded that skull shapes are determined more by environment than by race. It was a powerfully influential finding, because at the time, skull size and shape were thought to be connected to intelligence. [b]Now, though, a new analysis suggests the distinguished anthropologist got it wrong: Race--or more properly, ethnicity _ is a bigger determinant than environment.[/b] Whether Boas deliberately distorted his findings is not clear. But researchers think he may have had preconceived ideas about what the data should show. ``It's pretty clear that Boas was in the forefront of racial equality and sex equality, and it's pretty clear that he was in the forefront of rejecting the ideas of racial typology and scientific racism that existed in the early century,'' University of Tennessee anthropology professor Richard Jantz said. ``It wouldn't be hard to imagine that he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to get out of this study, but I wouldn't want to say we know that's true.'' Jantz also said that Boas was ``seriously hamstrung because he couldn't analyze all that data with the resources available to him at the time.'' In Boas' day, the general view was that Europeans were the dominant race, an argument often based on brain size. For decades, scholars opposed to such notions have cited Boas' study of immigrants and their offspring. But Jantz and Penn State graduate student Corey Sparks used a computer to re-crunch Boas' numbers. They reported in the Oct. 7 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the data actually show that race had more influence than environment on skull dimensions. ``Unfortunately, research design was deficient, and his findings were never critiqued in a systematic way until recently,'' Jantz and Sparks said in their paper. But American Anthropologist, the journal of the American Anthropological Association--which Boas helped found in 1902 _ plans to publish another study in March in which researchers led by Clarence C. Gravlee of the University of Michigan conclude, ``Boas got it right.'' Gravlee said he had not interpreted Boas' study as saying race or genetics had no influence on head shapes, only that environment also played some part. ``We independently find that there are differences between those born in Europe and those born in the United States. In a single generation, there was some change, no matter how small,'' he said. The magazine has asked Jantz and Sparks to write a companion piece for which they will do more research into how and why Boas reached his conclusions. Sparks said he and Jantz are not suggesting a return to the idea Boas rejected--namely, that a larger cranium equals a bigger brain equals higher intelligence. ``There still are occasional individuals that think that, but it's pretty much been debunked. There is so much variation in brain size that we all overlap in brain size with other population groups,'' Sparks said. Boas, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1880s, taught at Clark University and at Columbia University and founded the anthropology department at Barnard College. His students included Margaret Mead. Boas took measurements of skull length, width and the ratio between the two in 1909 and 1910 of European-born immigrants and their American-born children from seven population groups: Bohemians, Central Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Scots, Sicilians, and a group of people of Jewish ancestry from western Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Romania. Boas did not directly compare the study subjects' cranial volume _ that is, their brain size. In a 1912 American Anthropologist article, Boas said the length of exposure to the American environment had dramatic effects on cranial form. He said this was evidence of cranial ``plasticity,'' the idea that environment caused changes in skull dimensions and that differences were due more to environment than heredity. For example, he reported that Eastern European Jews tended to have very round heads but were becoming more long-headed, while southern Italians were exceedingly long-headed but were becoming more short-headed. But Jantz and Sparks said that in America, blacks and whites have not converged toward a common skull shape, as might be expected if Boas' theory were correct. Jantz and Sparks said their analyses did show small differences between the European-born and American-born members of the same population groups, but not as great as the differences between population groups. ``We're not sure if it was wishful thinking on his part before he even started the whole thing, or whether he saw these very small differences and said that was enough to prove his point,'' Sparks said. ___ On the Net: Jantz and Sparks article: [URL=http://www.pnas.org]http://www.pnas.org[/URL] Gravlee, Bernard, Leonard article: [URL=http://www.aaanet.org/aa]http://www.aaanet.org/aa[/URL] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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