In 1883 French savant researcher Alphonse Bertillon (b.1853) gave this name (Anthropometry) to a system of human identification after he found out that certain measurements in the body remained significantly the same in adulthood. These were:
- head length;
- head breadth;
- length of middle finger;
- of left foot, and
- of cubit or forearm from the elbow to the extremity of the middle finger.
In those early years these were widely used in the police for identification of criminals and was very popular until a British Scientist Francis Galton improved his work. Bertillon’s system originally measured variables he thought were independent—such as forearm length and leg length—but Galton had realized that these were both the result
of a single causal variable (in this case, stature).
Galton produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime and was knighted in 1909. He created the statistical concepts of regression and correlation. He discovered regression toward the mean, and was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and heredity, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for his anthropometric studies.
As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology (the branch of psychology that concerns itself with psychological differences between people, rather than on common traits). He finally devised a method for classifying fingerprints useful in forensics, that is abundantly used today.
Anthropology and Anthropometry
During the early 20th century, anthropometry was used extensively by anthropologists in the United States and Europe. One of its primary uses became the attempted differentiation between supposed differences in the races of man, and it was often employed to show ways in which races were supposedly inferior to others.
The wide application of intelligence testing also became incorporated into a general anthropometric approach, and many forms of anthropometry were used for the advocacy of eugenics policies.
During the 1940s anthropometry was used by William Sheldon when evaluating his somatotypes, according to which characteristics of the body can be translated into characteristics of the mind. He also believed that criminality could be predicted according to the body type.
On a micro-evolutionary level, anthropologists use anthropometric variation to reconstruct small-scale population history. For instance, John Relethford’s studies of early twentieth-century anthropometric data from Ireland show that the geographical patterning of body proportions still exhibits traces of the invasions by the English and
Norse centuries ago.