Sommer explores the history of visual portrayals of human population relationships and evolutionary trees from pre-Darwinian times up through the early 21st century. This is an important and timely book that should be read by both professionals and the general public as it shows how these portrayals have been used both to justify racism and to debunk the very concept of human races.
Prof Alan R. Templeton
Washington University
About the Author
Introduction
1. Esthetics, Diagrammatics, and Metrics: The Beginnings of Physical Anthropology
2. Samuel George Morton and His (Paper) Skulls
3. Kinship Denied and Acknowledged
4. Prichard’s Third Edition of Researches (1836–47) and Nott’s and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854)
5. Codifying a Diagrammatics of ‘Race’
6. The First Tree of the Human ‘Races’: Mappa Mundi, Chain of Being, and Tree of Life
7. Map, Scale, and Tree in Natural History
8. Map, Scale, and Tree in Darwin, Haeckel and Co.: The Genealogy of the Human Species
9. Map, Scale, and Tree in Darwin, Haeckel and Co.: The Genealogy of the Human ‘Races’
10. About Treeing…
11. Denying Even the Tree-Structured Human Kinship
12. Meandering Rivers and Synthetic Networks against Polygenism
13. The Reaffirmation of the Polygenist ‘Tree’
14. Cable or Tangled Skein?
15. Missing Links to the Eugenic Pedigrees
16. The History, Geography, and Politics of Human Genes
17. Genetic Trees, Admixture, and Mosaics
18. Gene Flow and Ancient DNA: Trees with Connecting Branches
19. The (Diagrammatic) Narratives of Genetic Revolutions
20. Deconstructing the Tree Diagram to a Mess – or at least a Net
References
List of Illustrations
Index
Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.