A HUMAN skull can be a scientific specimen, but never only that. It always comes with a story attached of how the person it belonged to lived and died, and how their skull came under the scientist’s gaze.
Ann Fabian’s painstakingly researched book begins with Philadelphian naturalist George Morton, who collected nearly 1000 skulls before his death in 1851. His measurements were the raw data for a new racial “science”. As Fabian says, the human races were invented, not discovered, each created for their region of the globe, with whites claimed to be a bit smarter than the rest.
She…
