Six degrees of Earnest Hooton

In my “Race and Human Variation” (Anth 214) I try to use race as a guide to teach some of the history of physical anthropology. One of the lessons I present, using myself as the example, is “six degrees of Earnest Hooton.” Hooton, originally trained as a classicist from Wisconsin, helped train, and thereby populate, much of the first generation of American physical anthropologists. Hooton’s students and their subsequent academic progeny on down the line represent a diverse group–in background, experience, training, and perspective–and yet it is worth considering the impact of this academic founding event.

The Academic Phylogeny of Physical Anthropology project that I linked to last week gives us a tool to look at this in more detail. There are still many additions that could be made to the tree, but at the moment, the tree has nearly 1100 people with no user submissions waiting to be added. Here is a cut-away of Hooton’s section of the overall picture:

HootonTree

As you can see, it is rather large. I admit to having lost count, but it appears to represent ~40% of the total entries into the phylogeny. Hooton’s personal relationship to the field remains remarkably under-studied (Giles, 2012), despite being controversial. Hooton’s legacy, however, largely is American Physical Anthropology, for better and for worse.

One of the other interesting things the above tree clearly demonstrates is the complexity brought about by over-lapping generations. For example, I am an academic “cousin” to one of my undergraduate advisors (George Armelagos), being an equal number of steps removed from Hooton, despite a 38-year gap (1968 vs. 2006) in our Ph.D. dates.

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1. Giles, E. (2012) “Two faces of earnest A. Hooton” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 149(55):105-113. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22162

About Adam Van Arsdale

I am biological anthropologist with a specialization in paleoanthropology. My research focuses on the pattern of evolutionary change in humans over the past two million years, with an emphasis on the early evolution and dispersal of our genus, Homo. My work spans a number of areas including comparative anatomy, genetics and demography.
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