Introduction

History of the Human Sciences

2015, Vol. 28(5) 3–16
Visibility matters: ª The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
Diagrammatic renderings sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0952695115607373

of human evolution and hhs.sagepub.com

diversity in physical,
serological and molecular
anthropology

Veronika Lipphardt
University College Freiburg, Germany

Marianne Sommer
University of Lucerne, Switzerland

Abstract
Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible
and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning
and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences
throughout the 20th century, the contributions to this special issue highlight some
dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This
article aims to provide an overview of and an introduction to the special issue ‘Visibility
Matters’.

Keywords
anthropology, diagram, diversity, evolution, visualization

Corresponding authors:
Veronika Lipphardt, University College Freiburg, Bertholdstrasse 17, 79098 Freiburg, Germany.
Email: veronika.lipphardt@ucf.uni-freiburg.de
Marianne Sommer, Department of Cultural and Science Studies, University of Lucerne, Frohburgstrasse 3,
Postfach 4466, Lucerne 6002, Switzerland.
Email: marianne.sommer@unilu.ch
4 History of the Human Sciences 28(5)

Images are no mere ornaments of texts, nor do they simply illustrate what is already tex-
tually explained. As many contributions to the iconic turn have emphasized, images are
at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave oth-
ers unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination
(Heßler, Adelmann, Frercks et al., 2009; Lynch and Woolgar, 1990, 2014; Pauwels,
2006; Scholz and Griem, 2010). Along these lines, it has been shown for visualizations
of human evolution and diversity that they constitute arguments and shape the anthropo-
logical sciences. They inform and are informed by popular perceptions of self and other
(e.g. Moser and Gamble, 1997; Redknap, 2002). Scientists as well as science studies
scholars have discussed how scientific accounts of human evolution inevitably implicate
arguments and judgements about contemporary human variation (e.g. Haraway, 1990;
Marks, 2006; Proctor, 2003; Wolpoff and Caspari, 1997).
Visualizations of human evolution and diversity have received considerable attention
with regard to dioramas and photographs. However, a different kind of imagery has
largely escaped systematic analysis: the diagrammatic – the charts that collocate data and
the drawings that visualize processes, functions and relationships. This is all the more
astonishing in the light of the 19th-century turn towards rigorous measurement and
visual presentation of data in tables and graphs (Tufte, 1990, 1997) that coincided with
the turn towards evolutionary accounts of human history (Gould, 1996[1981]). Diagram-
matic representation typically employs a combination of textual, numerical, symbolic
and pictorial elements (Goody, 1977; Tufte, 1997). It relates, clusters, serializes, spatia-
lizes and temporalizes data. It allows the synoptic presentation of singular observations
and measurements that bring to light otherwise unseen patterns, processes, functions and
relationships.
In this special issue, we engage with aspects of the history and present of such dia-
grammatic tools of knowledge generation and communication in the anthropological
sciences including the younger and very powerful technologies of visualization in mole-
cular anthropology. We look at the practices behind the diagrams: the processes and
techniques that transform data into tables, graphs, maps and trees. How exactly are dia-
grams made, from the collecting of bodily parts or fluids, to publication or presentation?
What is their epistemic function? How prominent are they in particular publication gen-
res? How do they combine with each other, for example, in a film?

Imag(in)ing the deep past of human diversity

Portraits and Life Scenes
From the second half of the 19th century onwards, popular writers and scientists alike
made use of visualizations to purport their views of human prehistory. To our knowl-
edge, the first picture that was loosely based on palaeoanthropological evidence and
expressed the idea of a human prehistory was Pierre Boitard’s ‘L’homme fossile’
[‘Fossil Man’] in the Magazin universel of 1836 (Secord, 2001: 312). The visual recon-
struction of human ancestors was linked to politics from the start, in Boitard’s case to the
aims of radical socialism. Furthermore, Boitard’s fossil man had obviously been inspired
by ape and ‘Negro’ imagery as well as by Dumont d’Urville’s descriptions of ‘primitive
Lipphardt and Sommer 5

tribes’. Artists such as Emile Bayard who produced the series of prehistoric scenes for
Louis Figuier’s L’homme primitif in 1870 also drew on visual art motifs such as the
Graeco-Roman origin myths, the medieval Wild Man, Adam and Eve in Paradise, or
ancient Celtic warriors (Moser, 1998). Since the La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal
images based on Marcellin Boule’s and Arthur Keith’s competing reconstructions were
widely distributed via L’Illustration and The Illustrated London News in 1909 and 1911
respectively (Moser, 1992; Sommer, 2006), the number of such images has risen
exponentially.
Anthropologists and archaeologists themselves, as well as historians and sociologists
of science, have analysed the alluring depictions of prehistoric humans and especially of
life scenes. They have in particular highlighted the ways in which these are – frequently
blatantly – racialized and gendered. Studies have focused on strategies of persuasion and
the establishment of genres as well as the manifold cultural preconceptions that are
worked into images of human evolution. The figures or the scenes represented may,
among other things, be plausible because they represent current social realities and
stereotypes. As visual repertoire for the depiction of apes, ‘Negroes’ and Neanderthals,
characteristics such as hairiness, dark skin, strong muscles, a protruding jaw, long arms,
well-developed brow ridges, large canine teeth, etc., function as markers of the primitive.
Conversely, gracility, lightness of skin, prominence of the frontal part of the brain,
straight hair, etc., signify the biologically and culturally advanced. In terms of behaviour,
the latter characteristics are associated with elaborate material culture, with language, art
and complex social organization, pointing in the direction of western civilizations (e.g.
Moser, 1993b; Sommer, 2007: 247–62).
Additionally, the hunters, toolmakers and artists of the scenes – those standing erect
and in action – are predominantly male, while their female counterparts, if present, squat
at the margins or kneel in front of a fireplace. Such role ascriptions again seem to draw
on schemata from art history – conventionalized representations of people and objects –
as in the case of man-the-toolmaker (mythical and everyday blacksmith in fine arts),
guy-with-a-rock in game killing (mythological hero in Italian Renaissance and later
painting), and drudge-on-a-hide (scullery maid in the background of many 17th- and
18th-century realist bourgeois scenes). While women may appear eroticized and
ornamental, the crouching woman in particular evokes associations with the animal,
the pornographic, the base and unevolved (Gifford-Gonzalez, 1993; also Berman,
1999; Conkey, 1997; Moser, 1993a; Wiber, 1997). Finally, scholars have investi-
gated how aspects such as gender, race and social norms in general are negotiated
between different actors in the process of producing a dioramic prehistoric scene,
how the three-dimensional space of the museum might have constituted visual
regimes, and how the meanings of imag(in)ings of human deeper history have been trans-
formed in circulation – how far racism and sexism rest in the eyes of the beholder (e.g.
Sommer, 2010).

Craniometric diagrams
No less ‘constructed’ than their naturalistic counterparts were the diagrammatic images of
skulls that were based on techniques from a craniometric tradition that reached back at
6 History of the Human Sciences 28(5)

least to the 18th century, European polygenists like Anders Adolf Retzius in Sweden, Paul
Broca in France, James Hunt in England and Rudolf Virchow in Germany were central for
the development of the methods and instruments as well as the institutionalization of phys-
ical anthropology in the 19th century. The American polygenist Samuel George Morton
produced Crania Americana in 1839 and Crania Aegyptiaca in 1844 that gave testimony
to a quantitative approach and a great collection of skulls. They inspired a crania genre that
turned skulls into collections of immutable mobiles such as figures arranged in tables,
curves of skull indices and volumes, as well as drawings and photographs (e.g. G. A.
Koeze’s Crania Ethnica Philippinica in 1901). Into this decidedly visual tradition, fossil
human remains were integrated, a process exemplified by such hallmarks as Reliquiae
aquitanicae in 1875 and Crania ethnica in 1882 that established the fossil races of Nean-
derthal and Cro-Magnon (Sommer, 2007: 121–3; Sommer, 2015: 45–58).
With the turn of the 20th century the diagrammatic image lost none of its impact.
Skulls were transferred onto paper as outlines that showed the points and lines rel-
evant for comparative measurements and they were often arranged in a series. Such
images remained an integral part of the establishment of the supposed hierarchy
from the white adult male via the female and ‘primitive races’ down to the prehis-
toric races and apes. Superimpositions of the outlines of skulls to compare prehis-
toric races to apes, recent ‘primitive races’ and/or recent ‘civilized races’ as
previously applied by Thomas Henry Huxley (Man’s Place in Nature in 1863) and
Charles Lyell (The Antiquity of Man in 1863) in the study of the Fuhlrott Nean-
derthal, as well as comparative alignment of jaws and other parts of the skeleton,
were widely employed (e.g. Marcellin Boule, Les hommes fossiles in 1921; Arthur
Keith, Ancient Types of Man in 1911; Hermann Klaatsch, ‘Entstehung und Entwick-
lung des Menschengeschlechts’ [‘On the Origin and Development of Humankind’]
in 1902). Sometimes the skull of a supposed genius was included to render the hier-
archy even more explicit.
The British geologist-turned-anthropologist, William Sollas, too, was a great aficio-
nado of measuring and drawing. In his papers and the influential book Ancient Hunters
and Their Modern Representatives in 1911, 1915 and 1924, he among many other
images published diagrams with curves that represented the skull-size range of living and
extinct hominids, their overlap ‘proving’ his argument that Pithecanthropus (today
Homo erectus) was closer to modern humans than apes. Elsewhere, he entered skull sizes
as dots in a coordinate system and linked them by a line to ‘show’ the linear increase in
brain size in the course of human evolution from a fossil ape, via Pithecanthropus, Nean-
derthal/Australian Aborigine, to the ‘modern white race’. To give another example: ‘The
British Oracle of Anthropology’, Arthur Keith, specialized in arranging the outlines
of skulls, jaws and teeth in frames and grids opposite each other to highlight their
differences (see his Antiquity of Man in 1915 and 1925). The information these
images are intended to convey is usually easily grasped, particularly if the viewer
is accustomed to their style. What cannot be seen are the controversies that went
on about the right interpretation and reconstruction of the skeletal remains, about
the best method of analysis, or indeed about the correct line of alignment of skulls
for comparison, and the most reliable points of reference for the measurements
(Sommer, 2007: part II).
Lipphardt and Sommer 7

Trees and maps

The most frequent diagram is likely the phylogenetic tree, because it has found such a
wide distribution outside expert circles. It has its roots in medieval genealogical repre-
sentations of ‘noble descent’ and sacred genealogy (the Tree of Jesse), in the visualiza-
tion of pedigrees in animal breeding, and in comparative historical philology. In
anthropology, it has appeared in many avatars, from Ernst Haeckel’s oak – that conveys
evolutionary progress and possibly the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny1 – to
naked line diagrams (Alter, 1999; Bouquet, 1994; Brace, 1981; Müller-Wille and Rhein-
berger, 2007). Trees have changed with the dominant view of human evolution in the
course of history, and the message varies with the visual metaphor: a bush is less hier-
archical than a tree, a chart less organic than a rhizome (Sommer, 2007: 187–96).
Possibly because of its rich cultural history, the visual language of the phylogenetic
tree seems straightforward. However, in reality it condenses elaborate theories and sce-
narios without revealing the decisions on which the particular pattern of branching is
based (Tattersall and Eldredge, 1977). Furthermore, already in the early decades of the
20th century, the ways in which phylogenetic diagrams were understood by non-
specialists might well have differed from at least the messages consciously intended
by their expert producers (Clark, 2001). Even if biologists tried to convey a more com-
plex idea of the evolutionary process, the public was so accustomed to the linear hierar-
chies from ape to man that evolutionary diagrams tended to be read as indicating a
goal-oriented and hierarchical development (Gould, 1995: 42–60).
Tree diagrams have gained renewed power in the second half of the 20th century
through the molecularization of research into human evolution (Sommer, 2008). In Som-
mer’s contribution to this issue, she reconstructs their history from the 1960s when math-
ematical and computational tools were developed to arrive at human-population trees
from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Sommer argues that the visual lan-
guage of the tree is a diaspora, and shows how the population tree was actually mapped
on the surface of the earth. She sees this visual language of the tree doubled in the dis-
course of unity in diversity that often structures especially popular textual renderings of
modern human evolution. This anti-racist liberal discourse has at times been criticized as
running counter to the socio-political effects of human population genetics – most nota-
bly in the Human Genome Diversity Project. Often based on so-called isolated peoples,
and continuing to use some of the earlier population labels, population-genetic tree dia-
grams are meant to represent a state before the great historical population movements.
Focusing on the work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Sommer
follows the practices of tree-building and -mapping from the early blood-group studies
to the current genome-wide admixture research.
The map is indeed a close ally of the tree when it comes to visualizing how human
groups have evolved and diversified on their migratory routes all over the globe. The racial
cartography of human origins may be traced to the 6th century (Livingstone, 2010), and the
history of thematic maps that are based on numerical data reaches back into the late 19th
century (e.g. Friendly, 2012). However, the seroanthropological analysis of blood helped
population geneticists to set a new trend in mapping so-called racial differences (Gannett
and Griesemer, 2004). In this issue, Susanne Bauer engages with the techniques of
8 History of the Human Sciences 28(5)

mapping human genetic diversity during late Soviet and early post-Soviet times. Since the
1970s, anthropologists and population geneticists at the Institute of General Genetics in
Moscow have worked on a project called ‘Genofond and Genogeography of the Popula-
tion in the Soviet Union’ that aimed at an inventory of all data ever collected on different
populations. They took up a Soviet tradition of genogeography from the 1920s to develop
statistical mapping techniques in collaboration with computer scientists. The visualiza-
tions of the resulting genogeographic atlas published in 2003 render the past present and
space dynamic. Bauer shows how molecular markers were integrated with early biological
data and inquires after the politics of difference in the process.

Rendering contemporary human diversity visible

A long-standing tradition in visualizing human diversity draws on a biblical topos: Noah’s
three sons have often been depicted as representing the oldest ancestors of the three
‘human races’. And indeed, assembling three, four, or five different faces in one picture,
and thereby demonstrating that humans are diverse, is one of the oldest and most pervasive
strategies of persuasion in this field. One finds this kind of representation even today – one
face representing one ‘race’ (or ethnicity) – together with other well-established visuali-
zations, classifications and descriptions of contemporary human diversity in school books
and children’s books, in atlases and handbooks, in encyclopedias and all sorts of educa-
tional material with a history dating back to the 19th century.2 To be sure, physical anthro-
pologists often used other, more abstract ways of visualizing diversity, at least in their
journal contributions (Hanke, 2007), and one needs to view their attempts to visualize their
understanding of divisions of humankind against this backdrop of a widespread, well-
established visual culture that drew heavily on faces. One could call this a visual culture
that was meant to make the – presumably – already visible even more visible.
In the same non-diagrammatical vein, spectacles like anthropological displays or
exhibitions of ‘African villages’ in European zoos (Dreesbach, 2012) and dioramas were
also meant to make the already visible even more visible, or to point out visible differ-
ences between humans, by putting them in spatial proximity and, thereby, in immediate
contrast. Such performances have been scrutinized, and their production, visual codes
and mythologies situated in the context of colonial science and public discourse (e.g.
Arnoldi, 1999; Bal, 1992; Hale, 2008; Haraway, 1984–5; Qureshi, 2011). Recent studies
have also highlighted the specific role of photography in anthropological and ethnogra-
phical research (Edwards, 1992; Edwards and Morton, 2009; Hight and Sampson, 2004)
and tackled the issue of visibility and invisibility in relation to racial thinking (Poole,
1997; Stoler, 1997). Yet before colour photography allowed for genres such as compara-
tive collections of portraits, visual comparison of human faces or bodies heavily rested
on drawings, sometimes coloured, and photographs in black and white; and accordingly,
on features such as shape of the eye or eyelid, hair texture, face shape, etc. (e.g. Nesturch,
1959: 24, table I). In combination with categories or textual descriptions of complexion,
such representations aimed at evoking visual types of humans (cf. Groebner, 2003).
However, for scientific inquiries, these typological strategies hardly sufficed when
new quantitative methodologies and new visual ways of documenting were introduced
from the late 19th century onwards (Hoßfeld, 2005; Laukötter, 2007). The materiality
Lipphardt and Sommer 9

of the very objects of study contributed to these new forms: whereas bones and skulls
made up specific objects that could be revisited, transported, stored and traded, studying
living humans brought new challenges, but also opportunities. Large numbers of individ-
uals could be recruited under certain circumstances, such as schools or military barracks
(Hartmann, 2011) but they could hardly be revisited. This made the challenge of mass
data processing and interpretation ever more difficult. Data visualization was one pro-
mising way to deal with this challenge.
Moreover, it was particularly the issue of complexion that fascinated life scientists in
the 19th century, as a visual clue to human variation and ancestry. While body height and
other measurements were acknowledged to be difficult to assess and compare, due to dif-
ferences in age, gender, or living conditions, complexion seemed to promise to be a rel-
atively gender and age neutral trait, and one that particularly promised to yield visual
clues. Objectifying and standardizing the visual impression of colour became one of the
preoccupations of those who worried about anthropometric methodologies.3
Beyond these concerns about visible traits, scientists became increasingly interested
in the quantitative analysis of differences that were not so easy to grasp visually. The
study of diversity of living humans considered an ever-growing number of potentially
relevant, comparable and measurable traits, and produced an endless stream of numerical
data from physiology, biochemistry, serology, pathology, genetics and other disci-
plines.4 Making the differences in distribution between human populations visible was
a challenge that scientists tried to meet with novel visualizing techniques. Yet the devel-
opment of statistical and cartographic tools for the analysis and visualization of human
diversity not only went hand in hand with new ways of analysing genealogical relations
(Parnes, 2007); it was also accompanied by intense debates about the adequacy of these
tools (Porter, 1995). There was by no means consensus on which of those traits were in
fact measurable, quantifiable, comparable and meaningful enough to yield important
insights into human variation (Massin, 1996). Neither was it univocally agreed upon
as to how the data could be collated, handled and interpreted. And finally, as the field
of theory of graphical representations grew in the early 20th century, there were plenty
of possibilities as to how the findings could be best presented (Auerbach, 1913; Tufte,
1997, 2001).
From these possibilities, scientists and science communicators chose different stra-
tegies for visualizing their claims about human difference. Some of the most relevant
strategies are discussed in the case studies assembled here, along with their impact
and issues regarding their wider distribution: as discussed above, maps and phyloge-
netic trees, the focus of Marianne Sommer’s and Susanne Bauer’s contributions, were
among those images that had for a long time circulated with great ease, and continued
to be the most preferred visualization in the second half of the 20th century; however,
now with a heavy leaning towards diagrammatic forms. Abstract visualizations such
as graphs, as in the case study of Amir Teicher, did not circulate very easily. This
finding is confirmed in Veronika Lipphardt’s article that contextualizes abstract dia-
grammatic visualizations in the visual repertoire of the field in the first half of the
20th century. Jenny Bangham’s article examines some of the strategic and aesthetic
decisions made in the graphical communication of genetics in anti-racist campaigns
after the Second World War.
10 History of the Human Sciences 28(5)

Graphs
Most abstract visualizations aimed at displaying correlations between data. Novel kinds
of diagrams, tables and graphs were continuously proposed and discussed by scientists as
useful tools of visualization. Statistical tables, for example, became a preferred visual
tool for comparing, for example, diverse demographic data derived from the study of eth-
nic groups in order to highlight the dynamic relationships between these groups, or
between the members and sub-groups of one particular group. The visual ordering of
data in tables deserves particular attention: it conveys statements about what is the norm,
what is the golden mean, or the most progressive variant. And yet, the informational
complexity a table can convey is limited: tables are often kept quite simple in order to
allow a quick take-up of information by the reader (Hanke, 2007; Lipphardt, 2009:
160, 176–80).
In contrast, statistical graphs were meant to allow for the display of the most complex
data relations. Amir Teicher shows how identifying clusters and group-differences
among a collection of numerical data is one of the veteran problems of statistical anal-
ysis. In 1907, the physical anthropologist Theodor Mollison came up with a novel
‘deviation-curve’, a compelling visual tool that allowed curves to be generated from
average measurements on populations which were plotted on a single coordinate system
and compared to finally point to phylogenetic similarities between human races. In the
early 20th century Mollison’s method proliferated in German-speaking anthropology and
was used in journal publications to bring order into otherwise opaque numerical results.
The article shows that the method of visualization inherent to Mollison’s method was
highly problematic, and that indeed many of the scholars who used this tool, although
partly aware of its drawbacks, found themselves falling into the pitfalls of its misleading
visual dimension. To account for the rise – and fall – of the ‘deviation curve’ in the
anthropological scientific community, the ‘visual culture’ of racial anthropologists is
examined. What made anthropologists cling to this problematic tool, so it is suggested,
was that it enabled the graphic reaffirmation of the alleged existence of human races at a
time when their existence was put under severe scholarly doubt.

Circulating images and visual communication

Certain forms of diagrammatic visualizations enjoyed more popularity than others in the
visualization of human variation, and travelled more readily than others from domain to
domain. Veronika Lipphardt’s article gives an overview of the visual culture shared by
a number of scientists focusing on human variation – or rather ‘race’ in actors’ terms –
in the first half of the 20th century. Clearly, drawings – and later photographs –
of people from all over the world constitute a crucial part of this visual culture.
Lipphardt’s article focuses on those parts of the visual repertoire that were meant to visua-
lize aspects of human variation that were not so obvious to the eye of the observer. Starting
from 1900, the article demonstrates how scientists built up a rich visual repertoire to help
in understanding human diversity, one that integrated maps, tables, photos, drawings, dia-
grams, abstract and non-abstract elements, but increasingly rested on diagrammatic visua-
lizations. Notably, although these diagrammatic visualizations gained in sophistication and
Lipphardt and Sommer 11

methodological rigour, they were rarely used in textbooks. More often, mixed strategies of
visualizations – diagrammatic elements integrated into non-diagrammatic images – were
chosen as representations of human diversity.
As Sommer’s and Bauer’s articles suggest, due to their ubiquity and origins in wider
visual culture, the tree and the map lend themselves to analyses of the circulation of
knowledge. But it is in Jenny Bangham’s contribution that issues of communication take
centre stage. She engages with the images published by UNESCO in 1952, in the picture
book What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists (1952), which was intended as a popular
exposition of UNESCO’s Second Statement on Race, made that year. Ostensibly written
for an audience of schoolchildren, What Is Race? sought to undermine racial prejudices
through the visual depiction of ‘scientific facts’ about genetics. Bangham examines the
design and visual language of the picture book in relation to the political agendas of
UNESCO’s model of science communication. Affirming UNESCO’s belief in the uni-
versal legibility of the images, they were redeployed in other media, including a film
strip for use in schools, in Life magazine, and on the BBC television programme Race
and Colour. Bangham also looks more closely at the visual and textual arguments about
genetics, especially the genetics of blood groups, which, as racially meaningful but non-
visible human traits, were strategically deployed to deflect attention away from physical
differences such as skin and hair colour.
If one aims to compare or view together these various developments, perhaps one
striking aspect is that rather than depicting humans, or body parts, a major trend in this
history of visualization was the turn to rendering relations visible. More abstract visua-
lizations however, like graphs and diagrams, may seem stunningly sophisticated, yet
their strategy of persuasion seems to have failed. Finally, what about critique, doubts and
resistances to visualizing human difference in the 20th century? As the articles of Lipp-
hardt, Sommer and Teicher suggest, a number of scientists paid critical attention to
visualizations and their potential to mislead understandings of human diversity. And
there have been controversies about the right way of visualizing different understandings
of it. Again, diagrams turn out to be technologies of persuasion not only of ‘lay publics’
but also of members of the scientific community who hold contrary views of human
evolution.

Notes
We wish to thank Susanne Bauer, Staffan Müller-Wille, Sandra Widmer, and the participants
in the workshop ‘Visibility Matters’ on 27–9 April 2013 in Lucerne, Switzerland, for discussing
Visibility Matters with us. Further, we are grateful to Leon Kokkoliadis, Nina Ludwig and Eric
Llaveria for their help with various versions of this text.
1. Haeckel, Anthropogenie (1874); in Generelle Morphologie (1866) and Natu¨rliche Scho¨pfungs-
geschichte (1868) Haeckel represented human phylogenetic relations by more abstract line
charts.
2. A late moment in this history is captured in Lipphardt’s account of late 20th-century German
textbooks (Lipphardt, 2009). See also Lipphardt and Patel (2007) on definitions and usages of
race(s) in encyclopedias and other popularizing publications.
3. By the early 1960s, reflection colorimeters and spectrophotometers had replaced coloured tiles
and dyed-hair samples for a machine-driven quantitative analysis of complexion, as Stanley
12 History of the Human Sciences 28(5)

Garn noted in 1962 (Garn, 1962). On the assessment of complexion see, for example, Groebner
(2003); Keevak (2011); Kudraß (2009).
4. There is a growing literature on physical anthropology and other disciplines that contributed to
the knowledge production about human variation. See, for example, the contributions to the
special issue 5 of Current Anthropology (Lindee and Ventura Santos, 2012).

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Author biographies
Veronika Lipphardt has recently taken up a position as Professor of Science Studies at University
College Freiburg. From 2009 to 2015, she was director of an independent research group at the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; and from 2011 to 2015, she was a professor of
the Free University, Berlin. She has worked on the history of the life sciences, particularly physical
anthropology and human population genetics, and on the history of knowledge about human var-
iation in the 20th century. An alumna of Die Junge Akademie, she has published numerous articles
on the history of human genetics and anthropology in the 20th century, as well as a book on German
Jewish physical anthropologists and geneticists and how they contributed to the scientific debate
about the so-called ‘Jewish race’ between 1900 and 1935.

Marianne Sommer is professor for Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and
Science Studies at the University of Lucerne. Prior to her current position, she has been at the
University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, Stanford University, Pennsylvania State University, and the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin among other institutions. She has pub-
lished widely on the cultural history of the life, earth and human origins sciences with a focus
on processes of narration, visualization and exhibition, and the circulation of knowledge.