Diagrammatics Of 'Race'2024
Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, Ca. 1770-2020
by Marianne Sommer
"This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the 'human family tree' was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever-does human relatedness take the shape of a...