ABSTRACT
From the 1860s onwards, German naturalists with an interest in human variation and origins set out to establish their research as a natural science discipline. Favouring an inductive, empiricist approach to their enquiries into human nature, they required comprehensive data in the form of skeletal remains that qualified for statistics-based comparative analysis. This chapter analyses the physical anthropological investigation of a particular cranial feature believed to occur frequently in Australian Aboriginal skulls. In 1875, Germany’s most influential physical anthropologist at the time, Rudolf Virchow, initiated a debate about the significance of the Stirnfortsatz for the evaluation of human diversity. This case study engages with some of the methodological debates emerging from German physical anthropologists’ positivist empiricism in the wake of Darwinian theorising about human evolution. At the same time, it casts light on pivotal contemporaneous assumptions about human diversity, showing that interpretations of physical features were often closely linked to prevalent assumptions about cultural and/or intellectual potential. It becomes apparent how early German physical anthropologists offered authoritative plausibility to already existent ideas of Australian Indigenous inferior status.
