The old and the new physical anthropology in the careers of E. A. Hooton and W. M. Krogman

Abstract

Physical anthropology changed many of its theoretical premises after World War II under the influence of the synthetic theory of evolution. Earnest Albert Hooton (1887-1954) and Wilton Marion Krogman (1903-1987) were excellent examples of leading workers whose research orientations differed, but whose students were important parts of the new consensus. These theoretical innovations undermined the racial morphological typology which underlay much of Hooton's work on racial history, and radiographs of the sizes of bone, marrow, muscle, and fat in the human brachium undermined his work and researches of other constitutionalists and increased the prestige of alternative work on body composition. Krogman, however, initially worked on the growth of the skull and dentition of the great apes and was a leader in human growth studies all his life. He was the most important writer in the United States on forensic applications of human skeletal biology. Since neither growth studies nor forensic applications depended much on typology, Krogman's publications were generally more modern than Hooton's. In terms of parsimony, Hooton's works can be criticized in terms of his cumbersome typology, but not his ideas on arborealism and the adaptive radiation of the primates. Krogman's interest in roentgenographic cephalometry may have been motivated by a concern for parsimonious explanations of craniofacial growth. Indeed, research in the new physical anthropology can truly be said to stand on the shoulders of these two giants.