Craniometry and Facial Prognathism important Methods in Human Classifications, despite Questionable backgrounds

Craniometry and Facial Prognathism, Special Guest Editorial

by Dr. Shi Huang,

Merely because an anthropologist harbored evil, racist ideologies does not automatically imply that they fabricated outright falsehoods about observable human anatomical features—doing so would have eroded their own scientific credibility in an era when empirical observation was a cornerstone of the discipline.

Historical figures like Paul Broca, a 19th-century French anthropologist and polygenist who espoused deeply racist views on human “races” as separate species, nonetheless contributed accurate measurements of cranial and facial traits, including prognathism (the forward projection of the jaws and midface).

Broca’s work on racial mixing and craniometry, while often twisted to support hierarchical notions of superiority, relied on genuine observations that align with modern bio-anthropological data on human variation. Similarly, the “facial angle” theory, pioneered by Petrus Camper in the 18th century and later co-opted by racists like Georges Cuvier, quantified facial prognathism as a metric of “primitiveness”—a concept rooted in observable skeletal differences but egregiously misused to justify colonialism and slavery.

From Britannica:

Much of Broca’s research concerned the comparative study of the craniums of the so-called races of mankind. Following precedents set by Samuel Morton in the United States, Broca developed numerous techniques to study the form, structure, and topography of the brain and skull in order to identify and differentiate human races. As a polygenist who considered the major human racial groups as separate species, Broca wrote influential works on “hybridization,” or the mixture of races, arguing that some mixtures of closely related races were beneficial (“eugenic”) while mixtures of greatly differing races were harmful (“dysgenic”).

Facial prognathism itself remains an indisputably primitive (ancestral) trait in hominin evolution, evident even to lay observers: it is pronounced in early hominids like Australopithecus and Neanderthals, while reduced in modern Homo sapiens, reflecting adaptations in diet, brain expansion, and facial architecture.

This is not a “racist lie” but a factual anatomical distinction, supported by contemporary studies in paleo-anthropology that document population-level variations without invoking hierarchy—such as greater average prognathism in some Indigenous Australian or sub-Saharan African groups compared to East Asian or European ones.

Yet, in their zeal to dismantle the legacies of scientific racism—exemplified by early 20th-century eugenicists and phrenologists who distorted such traits to fuel discrimination—today’s “woke” scholars risk intellectual dishonesty by outright denying or dismissing these objective differences as mere artifacts of bias.

This over-correction, often driven by ideological purity rather than evidence, undermines scientific credibility: it conflates description with prescription. True progress in anthropology demands acknowledging historical taints while preserving verifiable observations; otherwise, we trade one form of dogma for another, stifling open inquiry and allowing pseudoscience to flourish under the guise of moral virtue.

Editor’s Note – We are honored to run Dr. Huang’s full Editorial un-edited with his permission.