Indeed; not like they were reading direct quotes where we went "whoa, did they not censor that word- oh crap, they getting demonitized!" or the like...
Word associations happen regardless of context sometimes, so yea, it says they don't want to be associated with these topics, period. Its not that complicated, and it just easier to have a zero tolerance policy.
@@willjapheth23789 The unfortunate consequence is that honest people with good intentions get flagged while actual white supremacists find ways around it. Like most automated security, it only ends up punishing the innocent folks.
heh, reminds me of why Socrates was considered to be the wisest man because he knew one thing to be true...that is he knew nothing with absolute certainty.
As a patron whose degree was in biological anthropology, I really appreciate this discussion. There is so much to learn from the remains of our ancestors, but only when it’s done in a way that respects them, and us. My focus was on what bones can tell us about what people did, such as arthritis from repetitive motion. One of my faves was spinal injuries from up and down motion, now commonly found in motocross riders, but which used to be common among sailors because of all the waves slamming them up and down. These are great things to learn about what our ancestors did! And that’s why the field continues to be important.
As a physical anthropology student, first of all, thank you for making this. Second of all, I'd like to point out that anthropometry is nowdays an actual field of bioantropology that studies variation within and between populations, it's used in sizing of clothing for example.
@@sammyjones8279 standard sizes are made using anthropometry, by studying the variations in proportions in a given population. there's a project where I live, in Chile, that is using anthropometry to make clothing sizes accordinfg to chilean population instead of european.
Fun info about the Smithsonian. I work at a funeral home where an indigenous woman's brain was recently "discovered" at the Smithsonian. She is laid to rest in our cemetery. When she died her family was NOT consented nor notified that her brain had been removed post mortum. Her body is laid to rest in our cemetery and the children obviously wanted ALL of their mother to be together. The Smithsonian did agree to return the brain, but in order to reunite we needed to do things like open the vault and casket. This involves destroying the vault (concrete box that prevents the earth from collapsing), our cemetery agreed to waive all service costs, but couldn't fully eat the cost of a new vault and new grave marker that the family wanted. You would think that since the Smithsonian was the one to desecrate her body, and withhold this information from her CHILDREN they might be very willing to cover any repatriation costs, NOPE, nothing. Just an old brain in a styrofoam box they were willing to hand over to the kids, not even a "sorry we stole your mother's brain". Our cemetery did end up donating the vault, and new grave marker, and it was a beautiful private ceremony with her Tribe performing the appropriate rituals. But I still can't believe the callous attitude of the Smithsonian! They stole a dead woman's brain and were cheap jerks acting all annoyed that they had to give it back. As if the length of time since the commitment of the crime made it better. We're all now super protective of her grave BTW.
The Smithsonian isn't some monolithic tentacle monster. Almost all of its collection is donated items, not purchased. How did they acquire the brain? If it was some researcher donating their collection, why should they foot the bill, especially for something extra like a vault.
It's not only not an advertiser-friendly subject. As a biological anthropology professor, it is heartbreaking. These are the parts that are usually not discussed in our classrooms and that needs to change: what we do has real effects on the lives of people and the ethical dimensions of theory and practice are to be taken seriously and considered carefully.
Then change the text books, and add the information that this was how they did it in the past, and we don't do things that way anymore. Most of the world does not do things the same way they were done even 25 years ago. We need to learn, learn why, what to do next, and move forward. People used to be thrown in volcanoes or buried alive. Obviously, that is not how to get crops to grow or rain to fall. No one has really questioned that lately. Let the old information become obsolete. Let it be replaced with truth and verification. And let the next generations say to racist nonsense, of course that is not how we view it today. But first, keep the text books and educators up to date. The constant pearl clutching is not helpful if no one ever changes the data to reflect the truth. We have the whole state of Texas teaching from a distant past, known to be incorrect, outdated set of information. As with these past scientists, people only can know what they know. It's how we survive as a group.
The problem is that it's through people like this that we are where we are today, for better or worse. Even the most evil person plays a role in the greater picture. Without their horrific deeds what have we learned? You can't blame people for being the way they are during a given time period, the same could be said about today and our society. They'll look back at it 100 years from now and shake their heads.
@@dianapennepacker6854 But no one denies there are differences though, that's a strawman you're making. The problem is that people who focus on that distinction point are usually people who want to make sweeping racial generalizations. We've seen this in action in history, and I have yet to see today someone who's like "well but there ARE differences.." and two minutes later, they aren't talking somehow about black people, in comparison to whites. Lmao, it's obvious what they're trying.
@@huldu Yes, but you _can_ blame people for how they were in a given moment especially IF people from the same moment and same circunstances choose to not be a racist supremacist prick, like Franz Boas.
@@dianapennepacker6854so an interesting thing about sickle cell: it isn't impossible for it to occur in non-african people. In fact, the volume of non-african peoples with sickle cell is rising, and not for the reason you think. You see, one of the problems with things like Statistical Anthropology and Genealogy is that they heavily conflate "race" with "regionality." So far, there have been almost not traits that are truly "racial" in nature - none of them seem to depend upon the genetic factors that determine external features associated with race such as skin colour or facial features; on the contrary, they seem to be coincidental. Let's go back to sickle cell - sickle cell factor occurs most commonly in people of African descent, but does not require or even connect to any of the genetic factors that give one darker skin or the like; you see, Sickle Cell increases one's resistance to malaria, which is a disease mostly present in Africa. It can occur spontaneously in people of any racial background, but in regions where malaria is common, it is uniquely beneficial, and thus selection pressure determines that individuals with sickle cell may be more reproductively auccessful by reducing a factor of mortality. Similarly with alcohol tolerance, this is simply a human trait that groups withon certain regions had pressure to increase in the volume of individuals with those traits, irrespective of race. It is related to the individual and disparate factors that lead some people to be prone to chemical addiction while others have little or no vulnerability to it - it has nothing to with skin colour, and everything to do with when and where these traits arise and what environmental factors have led to either their increased concentration within the population or done nothing to decrease their prevalence. If the people in Africa were white skinned, they would still have a higher proportion of carrier of Sickle Cell as a human adaptation, irrespective of skin colour, as we see when the trait occurs sometimes spontaneously in people of other races and ethnicities. The same can be found of other factors such as lactase nonpersistence, thinner ankles, and increased ling capacity. The vast majority of these traits have been found to actually be linked to race so much as they are traits that can occur within humans of all types that have simply happened to occur most heavily in a region in which people of a particular ethnicity are most common, but are not even inherently related to the components of biological information that gives rise to what we identify as race. I do agree, as do many, that individual differences should be celebrated, but these are cultural aspects, traditions and values and perspectives. Awareness of racial identity is most important for awareness of social elements within a culture and how the *history* of racism and race relations has led to current and ongoing impacts on peoples of specific ethnicities.
In the Witte Museum in San Antonio during the 1950s when I was a child, there was an exhibit of a female native Indian grave from central Texas, including a skeleton. Even as I child, I wondered how I would feel if someone dug up my grandmother or mother and put their remains and the things we buried them with in an exhibit. After the first viewing, I gave the exhibit a wide berth. It freaked me out. It was removed in the 1970s when the focus of the museum changed but I have no idea what happened to it. The contents of a lot of their exhibits disappeared.
Funnily enough, seeing skeletons in a museum as a child made me dream of being a museum exhibit myself one day. I still feel want to end up in a museum exhibit (as a corpse) at some point and wonder what the best approach is to achieve that. Not that I'm putting much effort in, it's not THAT important to me. Still, funny how different people react to things differently.
@@Htonartnomedomg, just last night I told my daughter that I hope my skeleton gets found a couple thousandth years after being buried, by archaeologists! I was trying to think of what they could say about me by just my skeleton. I watch archaeology programs and when they find grave goods they can get more of the story than just the bones. That said, bones can tell you a lot. I’d be thrilled to end up on display or even in storage at museum or university. ❤
@Htonartnomed There are definitely ways to donate your remains. Off the top of my head, you might want to look into a man named Grover Krantz, and where his bones are now. :)
@@Htonartnomed never bothered me one way or another. My mother insisted I take photos of my Dad in his coffin. No idea why. She was always a bit morbid. Once Im dead I couldnt care less what happens to my body.
I'm glad that SciShow is making videos like this. The dream of science is to be apolitical but it's performed by flawed people in flawed systems, always has been, and we can't move past our mistakes and wrongdoings if we don't know what they are.
Science cannot be apolitical, as anytime something is researched, concluded, founded or theorized, it will always be involved, whether by the researcher themself or the audience
People already realized the mistakes last generation and fixed them, the only contemporary issue is a few fringe race realists that scientists can ignore but can sway laymen back into old ideas. You don't really need to be aware of old papers if you aren't using any of their research, it just historical content for historians.
For real, all the robotic comments, science this and that... Humans are the ones to do science, and yes, we did progress giant steps in the last 1/2 centuries. But humans make mistakes, we can be biased, there are conflict of interests, we have limited life spans, there are economic limitations and many more do affect science. Stop talking like robots. Some people talk about science as if it was a perfect incorruptible individual... Get out of your house to the real world please...
As a Native American I can say my family has been returned items and I didn’t release I couldbe so emotional over a leather belt of my great great grandfather whose name I share the man was buried with it. an when my family was put on the rez the grounds they use to bury their families in had a retired government building on it now.
Never? You clearly have 0 idea of the many, many cases of Academic fraud over the years. Don't be so naive as to think that science is perfect: It is not, it's just as vulnerable to lies and biases. It's the fate of everything humanity creates.
I don't think "always" is quite right here. There's a lot of cases continuing to the modern day where human bias within funding and reporting thwarts the efforts to make better science.
@@omegahaxors9-11 That reminds me of a comedy movie or show I once saw where people said they were fruitarians and only ate fruit or nuts that had fallen from trees (never picked) so they weren't hurting the plants.
@@hueypautonoman The good news is that fruits feel immense pleasure at being eaten and digested, like, the entire time, from the moment your tooth penetrates its skin all the way to the moment you sh-- it out.
Thank you for this! It relates heavily to the genocide and dehumanisation of non-white populations that we’re seeing now in Palestine. Hrdlička was in top academic ranks around 1930’s, barely a century ago when people thought your race determined your intelligence and made you “less than”. How can we be disillusioned to think the thought process of imperialist colonialists has changed much since. Very relevant and thanks for the great video.
The fact I've never heard of this guy and how much he had an impact on the world is all the more a reason for us to learn about this difficult topic. It may be dark and gruesome, but it allows us to learn from our past mistakes
The guy and the details are not something I've heard about either. I mean, if something like that was propagated by a Christian, and effected a whole scientific field, I feel like we would never hear the end of it, with science videos rightly condemning the perpetrators with barely contained anger. But this was hurried over with little-to-no anger detected.
@@FLPhotoCatcher And yet, Hrdlička founded the scientific (sub-)field, was influential on US policy, and was Christian (Catholic, specifically)- also a white male- and you never of him.
Thank you for covering this topic. The full history of museums, anthropology, and related fields in the colonial era is truly horrible, sordid, and some of the most disgusting things I've ever read. More people need to know how influential these ideas were (and still are) and just how deeply ingrained they are
These are the important stories to be told, because without acknowledging the flawed people who were also once considered 'Great' in their time, we can not learn to move past them and yet keep the little bits of truth they uncovered. We cannot forget the dark days that shaped us as a whole or we are doomed to relive them. Learning that people come with biases is important, and seeing and working around those biases is necessary.
@@samsonsoturian6013 The Advertisers did not want to come near this (and similar) topic(s). That speaks of a silencing culture where we just don't admit that the beliefs of the past can ever be wrong, or can ever be right because we don't talk about it. Or even that the same people who were so wrong about so many things, could ever have an idea that was right.
I studied physical and forensic anthropology (earning two degrees, bachelor's and master's) from a man who was in the "second generation" after Herdliscka (sp?). In other words, he studied directly under a student of Herdliscka. Fortunately, my mentor had already determined that many of the ideas that Herdliscka had were racist and wrong, and stressed that in his teaching of me and other students. I feel very fortunate to have studied under someone as open-minded and caring as Robert L. Blakely, Ph.D.
THANK YOU for this video! Psychology and criminology share the same problem, even worse in France where there are still very few professionals with an "actual" scientific background, so my heart goes to the bioanthropology colleagues, and to all the people who (sometimes unwillingly) helped our knowledge progress!!
@@Tonixxylooks at all the history of genocide, colonialism, slavery, and all the wars globally(currently syria, ukraine, israel, trying to start a war with china and iran)15% the minority of humans are responsible for, hm.
I'm a pediatrician and want to thank you for covering this. The practice of modern medicine has a history of cruelty, racism, and unethical behavior, all concealed and often ignored under the guise of flawed intellectualism, prestige, and sometimes just money. Yes, these people made "discoveries" & studies & surgical methods that may stand today, but the veracity of that data doesn't take *_anything_* away from the unethical way it was obtained. For example, I'm from Puerto Rico. Birth control pills were studied in Puerto Rican women without their full knowledge or consent of all the facts (some of the doses provided were absolutely shocking) but it doesn't mean I'm not going to prescribe birth control medication. And this was not 200+ years back, it was just decades ago.
wtf is up with all these advertisers who don't want their ads on videos like this? It's educational. I'm a small business owner and I would LOVE to be able to afford to advertise on a channel with this subscriber count. Good fricken' grief. Thank you for talking about this, SciShow. Someone has to.
Maybe they are too scared of being seen as picking a side, politicaly speaking. Or maybe SciShow wants to have full control of what they say and how they say it without it involving anyone else who could potentially veto some parts of the message
Even from an apolitical standpoint, discussion of dead bodies (or genocide or war crimes) is an "icky" topic that will turn a good chunk of the audience off. Viewers may make some kind of mental or emotional association between the advertiser and the unpleasant topic, through no fault of the advertisement nor the channel (correlation is the origin of superstition). Also, the topic will simply attract far fewer viewers who are more likely to be part of a niche audience, and therefore the advertisers perceive it as ineffective.
@@jliller Shouldn't there be levels of risk that advertisers *choose* to take? Not just a broad-brush approach to "advertisers"? Hmm, I guess corps big enough to advertise on popular videos are almost universally Lib or Left-leaning.
Dr Brennan did more for that field than anyone , and she's a fictional character =D but yeah, it's crazy how much of our modern understanding of stuff comes from old, weird, and downright awful past scientists...
I'd say thanks to the patrons too, this IS an important story that needs recognition and you're damn right, the Powers that Profit don't like these truths one little bit...
Many great discoveries through out the ages have been made through the suffering of others in one way or another and some like forensic anthropology need to be rectified with proper scientific experiments and observations
Do a Franz Boas video! He was amazing and definitely deserves more recognition and praise for going against the grain and truly wanting to understand people.
I'm studying Biological Anthropology in Undergrad right now (last year of credits), focusing on nutrition and forensic anthropology, and I absolutely love how this video covered the topic! I'm grateful that all of this is taught and discussed in my courses, as well as how anthropologists are continuing to push for improvement in all areas of the field. I work with some really great professionals who are always looking to improve our work. Thanks so much, SciShow team, for your work on this video!
What an important episode! Thank you for sharing this with us and help untangle subjects like this one. I am French and I know my country has done a lot of awful things to people it deemed inferior in the past (and frankly still does), but if I'm being honest I only know of a small fraction, it's not really something we're taught extensively in school and episodes like this one help paint a picture of what us white people have done to other humans and how it still influences how humans interact with each other nowadays
Thank goodness for this video. It's still way too common that people believe Race is a thing and that somehow there is this magic superiority because of it. These things sadly still sit deeply integrated into our society and we should have to face them at every turn and not bury them under the rug as Governments are want to do to make themselves look good. This is coming from a Canadian and I acknowledge our own rocky history with racism and the way it has established things today. So, no Country is without it's prejudice, but we should be able to work through it together and with the hopes to never repeat these mistakes.
Hey remember a few years back when sci show wanted to do an anthropology series but got shut down by their audience after they challenged an orthinologists theory of anthropology (even though he was wtong). Man that was a funny time
It is so important to hold your institutions accountable in regards to the federal law known as NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It's been an active, 30 year process to even have universities and museums show 'openness' to repatriation of human remains and funerary objects to the rightful descendants of the native tribes. I'd highly recommend looking into the In Effigy series which chronicles the scandals committed at Effigy Mounds National Monument as an example of huge, intentional missteps in neglecting and concealing remains in order to deny repatriation.
Every time someone asks what my major was, I tell them exactly how many skeletons the United States graverobbed. It's such an important part of history that nobody knows.
And in what way does this help them? Or you? Or any of the previous era's people? The past is not today. Tell them of all of the advancements and how it is being corrected. Then be a part of that movement forward.
@@catserver8577 I think this attitude covers up so much that we have to acknowledge with in the world. For some of us it's insulting that America has no cognition of its history.
@@catserver8577 I think this attitude covers up so much that we have to acknowledge with in the world. For some of us it's insulting that America has no cognition of its history.
@@catserver8577I'll answer you. It helps by acknowledging the reality most people don't want to look directly: their present is filled to the brink with past violations. That "humanity is not a rose to be smelled" is something everyone agrees in abstract, but no one wants to be reminded how often and how their own communities were perpetrators in that. Data is important to any future scientist and any person who wants to make informed decisions and judgement - and such history is part of that data. It shows how science is not sanitized from politics and social ideologies, which helps to keep an eye on current science and how it still made by the same prone-to-superstition or bias researchers. Casting a light on past bias in academic research makes us cast currently. Also, that "past" you speak of is not so distant at all, and many societies and communities are still directly affected today by their actions, and indirectly society as a whole still suffers racism and colonial structures of power. It's very present, from access to education, rights, law, and capital, you just need to look at your own politicians to see how it's still in the present. The notion of "It's in the past" is only proclaimed by those privileged to not see it or ignorant of how Humanities and History works.
My small country has a long list of famous person (like Purkinje) but I heard about Hrdlička like 2 weeks ago in my psychiatry class (I study medicine in Prague). Thank you for the video, I just knew that he was into Anthropology
Our small country has had big impact on the world! In medicine, technology, literature, music, etc... but to be honestly this was first time for me hearing of Hrdlička.
It is neat to see the presenters on this show get confident and develop their skills. They all start a little wobbly and then settle in. I was watching along and I realized that Stefan has developed really good vocal control and timing. Seems better than most TV presenters. It makes me happy for him. That is a real art.
You didn't really go into how Boaz was completely wrong too. He didn't just believe that race wasn't biological, but species too. He tried numerous expeditions to try to find great apes with the capability of developing a culture that could be considered comparable to human society. Also if you think that this rocks viewpoints, then you should look into Edward Burnett Tylor. He is basically solely responsible for all modern ideologies based on the silly premise that all religion/belief is wrong because societies all develop on a determined set belief system that evolves until it becomes optimal.
@@Xiassen He came up with this hypothesis when anthropology started looking at subsaharan cultures. He basically said "Look how primitive their beliefs are, this is what we must have been like when we were cave men." So he developed his theory that human beliefs start out as animist, then become polytheist, then monotheist. He viewed the final stage of human society as being "culturally christian but secular". This spawned the entire modern ideological movement. You can understand a lot of Nietzsche's philosophy building from this, around the question, "Wait a minute, if God is dead, but the morals he gave were somehow good, is that really a good thing, what should we do now?"
All religions ARE wrong. Not a shred of observable, testable, repeatable evidence for the existence of any god has ever been provided. People have to be TAUGHT to believe.
9:28 Big Huge Air Quotes around "new openness to repatriation." They don't *want* to send these things back, they're being forced to by the communities to whom they rightfully belong
Wow, probably the first time I hear a native English speaker NOT butchering a Czech name in a video! You pronounced it correctly all the time, chapeau!
it's good to see these things addressed. however, i'd like to never hear "a product of their time"again, as it's misleading and dismissive. modern views didn't come out of nowhere. as addressed, there were people in those times that were critical of eugenics & other harmful systems. but given that the critics often had little to no backing, whereas the biased "researchers" had institutional power & funding. so if people promoting ideas like hrdlicka were products of their time, _so were their critics._
It's just permissive and enabling, people can change over time but that doesn't mean they can't be held accountable anymore. Yes that was the status quo back then but we know better now and we should criticize the schools of thought and systems that still has influence in our modern day. It's disingenuous and I cannot take anyone who uses that argument seriously
Being right about the Bering Strait puts him ahead of Freud, who founded a field based on 100% pseudoscience and whose "contributions" are easy to discard. Hrdlicka also studied at the Homeopathic College of New York, and homeopathy is likewise 100% pseudoscience which has contributed nothing to real medicine.
I took physical anthropology in junior college long ago. Luckily, there was no nonsense in that course. Just the physical differences of the various pre-Homosapien ancestors across time.
The line about traumatizing indigenous communities is odd. I have no reason to doubt that the indigenous communities in question were being traumatized, but it's placed as part of a summary of specific actions that aren't necessarily traumatic.
I don't want another National Treasure movie. I want a film about a bunch of thieves who repatriate objects and remains that belong to other countries.
Ooo! I didn’t know about all that this is great to know thank you for sharing. It nice to learn new things and it definitely help to be aware of the original bias.
A great book about the significant pros and cons of the federal repatriation laws is "Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits) by Chip Colwell. I learned a lot about how both the government and 1st nations end up at odds with each other about both identifying and returning items from museum collections to their historic guardian.
This was super interesting. Obviously many iconic figures in US history were blatantly racist and that's super important to point out. At the same time here we see how the racist "scientist" was preferred over those who didn't validate race "science," and we could do to have more discussion on this political preference...
3:26 Many nations indigenous to the so-called Americas have flatly denied Hrdlička’s claim of a land bridge and say it contradicts their own history. They point out that the claim indigenous nations “migrated” across a land bridge is a racist myth used to deny their entitlement to their own land. Please read indigenous scholarship on this because I only have cursory knowledge. Thank you SciShow folks for this video!!
There's a difference between the scientific community frowning upon cadavers in general and treating the remains of certain races with respect while desecrating the graves of others.
Definitely a lot of things were learned by studying cadavers then, usually by grave robbing or buying the bodies of executed criminals. But on the scale of atrocities, studying volunteer cadavers is better than studying bodies of criminals and people chosen at random is better than studying bodies of people chosen by race
I am so hyed that SciShow did an episode about a topic about reckoning with a modern science's racist past. The more we learn about this, the more we learn about how it shapes modern society and what we need to do for equality.
As much as I love being an anthropology major, our past is incredibly racist and it’s hard to come to terms with all the not cool things that were done in the pursuit of science. We acknowledge the wrongdoings of our predecessors and try to do better and fix the mistakes of the past.
I think it's interesting that modern ethnicity-based population studies on Human Leucocyte Antigens (HLA) actually show that different populations of people (especially those that are more insular) are predisposed to different conditions that have genetic origins. the guy's methods & viewpoints were horribly unethical and he was barking up the wrong tree, but there's still some biological differences between different groups of people on the genetic level - at least until all of humanity eventually mixes and breeds homogenously.
Of course there are genetic differences between groups which have lived separately from other groups for many generations. But there's no genetic basis for races - genetically, races (the definitions of which differ from country to country) don't exist, there's no bundle of genetic differences that all people in one race share and no people in other races share. Including the genes that influence skin color - those don't match up to races, either. Some researchers, of course, still categorize people by race - and they will say that they find racial differences. But who, exactly, are they looking at? If they're looking at African Americans, for example, and assuming that the patterns they find among African Americans will be found in all people who they categorize as "black", they will be wrong. African Americans are not representative, genetically, of any group of dark skinned modern Africans. Researchers need to drop racial categories, because they have no biological basis. Shoe-horning people into racist categories that were invented for cultural reasons is just stupid.
@@nycbearffI have northern European descent. Most people like me have a combination of genetic flaws that predisposes us to skin cancer (ie white skin). I think that sort of clustering is what the original comment was trying to say. Of course there is no sharp genetic distinction between a northern European and say someone from central Africa, only some overlapping and a few non-overlapping combinations of genes.
Yes, but that does not make them a different race. All humans have 99.9% of the same DNA! It's not like the 1% that gives one group different diseases prevalences or different skin color make that person a different species of human, ie a different race!
@@HweolRidda yeah, a distinction needs to be made between race & species, it’s more like diff breeds of dog rather than dogs vs wolves, since the rule of thumb is that different species can’t produce fertile offspring, whereas different human races most definitely can.
@@Emcron It's even more dramatic than that. There's more genetic variation between different groups of chimps in central Africa than there is between human races. We went through a MASSIVE population bottleneck quite recently (in evolutionary time), apparently, and we're all just super similar!
I studied forensic science for a year in the mid 2010's at college and I was pretty shocked when the tutor told us the classifications were 'mongoloid' and 'negroid'. Not as a bit of historical trivia but as the actual categories we were supposed to use to classify remains. I don't know why they were using such outdated concepts
10:54. Mistake. Theological librarian here, Catholic version. Catholic Christianity is the main religion in Mexico. There's not such a thing as baptizing human remains. Baptism is a sacrament that can be performed *only* on living people. What most likely happened there is that there was a blessing of the remains or a funeral Catholic prayer (responso) to give the remains a respectful send off. *Not a baptism.* Edit. Found the source. The San Diego Union Tribune, "Mexico Indian remains returned from NY for burial," by Mark Stevenson, Associated Press writer. "(...) On Monday afternoon, on the slope of a mountain near the Yaqui village of Vicam, the 12 sets of remains were “baptized” to give them names that have been lost to history. (...)" Please notice that wrongly using quotation marks to signify things other than actual quotations leads to these kinds of mistakes. In colloquial language, baptizing has become a synonym of naming. It is evident here that there was not an actual baptism, but a naming. That was the expression that should have been used here: "they were given names" instead of "baptized." By the way, you omitted several gruesome details about the massacre and what the anthropologist did to the remains to take them. He boiled the heads to obtain the skulls. Both the bloody massacre and the nasty treatment of the dead bodies - taken into the concept of the alleged superiority of the white race - what an oxymoron.
Weren't powerful people of the 1800s obsessed with how Anglo Saxons were the most superior "race" ? This guy's name does not seem to be Anglo-Saxon. Was that obsession over by the time this guy started looking for the most superior "race"?
@samsonsoturian6013 I mean colonial-era attitudes and practices. Not actually creating colonies. Ethnomusicology has been done since the 1890s, but really became its own field in the 1950s. Many early Ethnomusicologists were very racist people who sought to confirm their preexisting biases against non-Western music.
Wagner is a similarly problematic figure for musicologists. The ways that he shaped European/Western music and particularly the way he approached opera are impossible to ignore, but he was also anti-Semitic. It's important that we don't sanitize these figures in an attempt to protect the contributions they've made to collective knowledge.
I think a clarification on this video is VERY necessary. While yes, Franz Boas was better than many of his peers in that he opposed a lot of the scientific racism which was prolific at the time, it is remiss not to mention that he ALSO stole and sold the bodies of indigenous people. He admitted to it during his lifetime. If you google “Franz boas stealing indigenous bodies”, this information will come up.
The other huge mistake Ales Hrdlicka made was in regard to the antiquity of people in the Americas. He vehemently fought with and attacked the people who discovered the Folsom and Clovis animal remains in conjunction with human spear points. He adamantly refused to accept human presence in the Americas beyond 3000 years before the present. He angrily hung on to this belief long after it was well established by objective proof that man's presence on the continent was much older.
Ok so this scientist embarked on a journey to either prove or disprove a hypothesis he had. He was proven to be wrong. Good. We ruled something out. Then make another hypothesis and test that.
@@mateostenberg What's yours? Have you ever wanted to know the truth about something? There's a process to it, which includes ruling out other possibilities. And as you continue to rule things out, you get closer and closer to the truth. And sometimes the truth is that our preconceived notions have no factual basis in reality. That is GOOD information for humanity to have going forward to not waste time investigating something that isn't there. For ages, humans thought the sun revolved around the Earth until we proved that it doesn't. The man was looking for a way to explain his observations only to find out he was going about everything the wrong way. We humans cannot only learn from our own mistakes, but learn from the mistakes of others. Don't be an idiot.
Don’t you know that medieval people from Europe are also sometimes dug up and studied? Human remains can tell you a lot about the history of people who’s lives weren’t documented like the nobility’s were.
... what's wrong with using human remains for study? They're dead, so it's not like they care. I'd understand if a family's recently departed had their remains exhumed without their consent; that would be emotionally traumatic. But their descendants generations later have no emotional stake; it's just posturing.
They were a product of their time, they believed what was taught in their culture and the evidence they thought they saw… not an excuse, it’s just the way it was. Fortunately, we have learned a lot since then.. at least that’s the hope! 😫
The fact that this video wasn't "advertiser friendly" says more about the advertisers than it does about this show.
Indeed; not like they were reading direct quotes where we went "whoa, did they not censor that word- oh crap, they getting demonitized!" or the like...
Word associations happen regardless of context sometimes, so yea, it says they don't want to be associated with these topics, period. Its not that complicated, and it just easier to have a zero tolerance policy.
@@willjapheth23789 The unfortunate consequence is that honest people with good intentions get flagged while actual white supremacists find ways around it. Like most automated security, it only ends up punishing the innocent folks.
Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyup!
@@willjapheth23789 ease is relative :)
The most important ability for a scientist is the ability to admit when you are wrong.
Yeah goodluck with that. 😂
heh, reminds me of why Socrates was considered to be the wisest man because he knew one thing to be true...that is he knew nothing with absolute certainty.
Not in modern Political Science and Government funding for those who say what their masters want to hear.
@@geofftimm2291yeah okay bro
Pretty much true for anyone, with a minimal mind, who can grasp that actions have consequences.
As a patron whose degree was in biological anthropology, I really appreciate this discussion. There is so much to learn from the remains of our ancestors, but only when it’s done in a way that respects them, and us. My focus was on what bones can tell us about what people did, such as arthritis from repetitive motion. One of my faves was spinal injuries from up and down motion, now commonly found in motocross riders, but which used to be common among sailors because of all the waves slamming them up and down. These are great things to learn about what our ancestors did! And that’s why the field continues to be important.
WOAH!! That’s cool!
Would those who rode horses a lot maybe have suffered from the same thing?
As a physical anthropology student, first of all, thank you for making this. Second of all, I'd like to point out that anthropometry is nowdays an actual field of bioantropology that studies variation within and between populations, it's used in sizing of clothing for example.
That's fascinating - how is it used in clothing sizing?
Speaking as a human who has to sew her own clothes if she wants them to fit properly, I wish they'd use it more.
@@onbearfeetclothing sizes seem to really be more of a vague brand feeling, plus or minus 10
@@sammyjones8279 standard sizes are made using anthropometry, by studying the variations in proportions in a given population. there's a project where I live, in Chile, that is using anthropometry to make clothing sizes accordinfg to chilean population instead of european.
And condoms.
Fun info about the Smithsonian. I work at a funeral home where an indigenous woman's brain was recently "discovered" at the Smithsonian. She is laid to rest in our cemetery. When she died her family was NOT consented nor notified that her brain had been removed post mortum. Her body is laid to rest in our cemetery and the children obviously wanted ALL of their mother to be together. The Smithsonian did agree to return the brain, but in order to reunite we needed to do things like open the vault and casket. This involves destroying the vault (concrete box that prevents the earth from collapsing), our cemetery agreed to waive all service costs, but couldn't fully eat the cost of a new vault and new grave marker that the family wanted. You would think that since the Smithsonian was the one to desecrate her body, and withhold this information from her CHILDREN they might be very willing to cover any repatriation costs, NOPE, nothing. Just an old brain in a styrofoam box they were willing to hand over to the kids, not even a "sorry we stole your mother's brain". Our cemetery did end up donating the vault, and new grave marker, and it was a beautiful private ceremony with her Tribe performing the appropriate rituals. But I still can't believe the callous attitude of the Smithsonian! They stole a dead woman's brain and were cheap jerks acting all annoyed that they had to give it back. As if the length of time since the commitment of the crime made it better. We're all now super protective of her grave BTW.
The Smithsonian isn't some monolithic tentacle monster. Almost all of its collection is donated items, not purchased. How did they acquire the brain? If it was some researcher donating their collection, why should they foot the bill, especially for something extra like a vault.
It's not only not an advertiser-friendly subject. As a biological anthropology professor, it is heartbreaking. These are the parts that are usually not discussed in our classrooms and that needs to change: what we do has real effects on the lives of people and the ethical dimensions of theory and practice are to be taken seriously and considered carefully.
Then change the text books, and add the information that this was how they did it in the past, and we don't do things that way anymore. Most of the world does not do things the same way they were done even 25 years ago. We need to learn, learn why, what to do next, and move forward. People used to be thrown in volcanoes or buried alive. Obviously, that is not how to get crops to grow or rain to fall. No one has really questioned that lately. Let the old information become obsolete. Let it be replaced with truth and verification. And let the next generations say to racist nonsense, of course that is not how we view it today. But first, keep the text books and educators up to date. The constant pearl clutching is not helpful if no one ever changes the data to reflect the truth. We have the whole state of Texas teaching from a distant past, known to be incorrect, outdated set of information. As with these past scientists, people only can know what they know. It's how we survive as a group.
The problem is that it's through people like this that we are where we are today, for better or worse. Even the most evil person plays a role in the greater picture. Without their horrific deeds what have we learned? You can't blame people for being the way they are during a given time period, the same could be said about today and our society. They'll look back at it 100 years from now and shake their heads.
@@dianapennepacker6854 But no one denies there are differences though, that's a strawman you're making. The problem is that people who focus on that distinction point are usually people who want to make sweeping racial generalizations. We've seen this in action in history, and I have yet to see today someone who's like "well but there ARE differences.." and two minutes later, they aren't talking somehow about black people, in comparison to whites. Lmao, it's obvious what they're trying.
@@huldu Yes, but you _can_ blame people for how they were in a given moment especially IF people from the same moment and same circunstances choose to not be a racist supremacist prick, like Franz Boas.
@@dianapennepacker6854so an interesting thing about sickle cell: it isn't impossible for it to occur in non-african people. In fact, the volume of non-african peoples with sickle cell is rising, and not for the reason you think. You see, one of the problems with things like Statistical Anthropology and Genealogy is that they heavily conflate "race" with "regionality." So far, there have been almost not traits that are truly "racial" in nature - none of them seem to depend upon the genetic factors that determine external features associated with race such as skin colour or facial features; on the contrary, they seem to be coincidental.
Let's go back to sickle cell - sickle cell factor occurs most commonly in people of African descent, but does not require or even connect to any of the genetic factors that give one darker skin or the like; you see, Sickle Cell increases one's resistance to malaria, which is a disease mostly present in Africa. It can occur spontaneously in people of any racial background, but in regions where malaria is common, it is uniquely beneficial, and thus selection pressure determines that individuals with sickle cell may be more reproductively auccessful by reducing a factor of mortality. Similarly with alcohol tolerance, this is simply a human trait that groups withon certain regions had pressure to increase in the volume of individuals with those traits, irrespective of race. It is related to the individual and disparate factors that lead some people to be prone to chemical addiction while others have little or no vulnerability to it - it has nothing to with skin colour, and everything to do with when and where these traits arise and what environmental factors have led to either their increased concentration within the population or done nothing to decrease their prevalence.
If the people in Africa were white skinned, they would still have a higher proportion of carrier of Sickle Cell as a human adaptation, irrespective of skin colour, as we see when the trait occurs sometimes spontaneously in people of other races and ethnicities. The same can be found of other factors such as lactase nonpersistence, thinner ankles, and increased ling capacity. The vast majority of these traits have been found to actually be linked to race so much as they are traits that can occur within humans of all types that have simply happened to occur most heavily in a region in which people of a particular ethnicity are most common, but are not even inherently related to the components of biological information that gives rise to what we identify as race.
I do agree, as do many, that individual differences should be celebrated, but these are cultural aspects, traditions and values and perspectives. Awareness of racial identity is most important for awareness of social elements within a culture and how the *history* of racism and race relations has led to current and ongoing impacts on peoples of specific ethnicities.
In the Witte Museum in San Antonio during the 1950s when I was a child, there was an exhibit of a female native Indian grave from central Texas, including a skeleton. Even as I child, I wondered how I would feel if someone dug up my grandmother or mother and put their remains and the things we buried them with in an exhibit. After the first viewing, I gave the exhibit a wide berth. It freaked me out. It was removed in the 1970s when the focus of the museum changed but I have no idea what happened to it. The contents of a lot of their exhibits disappeared.
Funnily enough, seeing skeletons in a museum as a child made me dream of being a museum exhibit myself one day. I still feel want to end up in a museum exhibit (as a corpse) at some point and wonder what the best approach is to achieve that. Not that I'm putting much effort in, it's not THAT important to me. Still, funny how different people react to things differently.
@@Htonartnomedomg, just last night I told my daughter that I hope my skeleton gets found a couple thousandth years after being buried, by archaeologists! I was trying to think of what they could say about me by just my skeleton. I watch archaeology programs and when they find grave goods they can get more of the story than just the bones. That said, bones can tell you a lot. I’d be thrilled to end up on display or even in storage at museum or university. ❤
@Htonartnomed There are definitely ways to donate your remains. Off the top of my head, you might want to look into a man named Grover Krantz, and where his bones are now. :)
Well. After I am dead, obviously, I won't care one bit to what happens to my body.
@@Htonartnomed never bothered me one way or another. My mother insisted I take photos of my Dad in his coffin. No idea why. She was always a bit morbid.
Once Im dead I couldnt care less what happens to my body.
I'm glad that SciShow is making videos like this. The dream of science is to be apolitical but it's performed by flawed people in flawed systems, always has been, and we can't move past our mistakes and wrongdoings if we don't know what they are.
Science cannot be apolitical, as anytime something is researched, concluded, founded or theorized, it will always be involved, whether by the researcher themself or the audience
People already realized the mistakes last generation and fixed them, the only contemporary issue is a few fringe race realists that scientists can ignore but can sway laymen back into old ideas. You don't really need to be aware of old papers if you aren't using any of their research, it just historical content for historians.
Very true. We need to be open about past travesties.
For real, all the robotic comments, science this and that... Humans are the ones to do science, and yes, we did progress giant steps in the last 1/2 centuries. But humans make mistakes, we can be biased, there are conflict of interests, we have limited life spans, there are economic limitations and many more do affect science. Stop talking like robots. Some people talk about science as if it was a perfect incorruptible individual... Get out of your house to the real world please...
Money, Tenure, and Fellowships.
As a Native American I can say my family has been returned items and I didn’t release I couldbe so emotional over a leather belt of my great great grandfather whose name I share the man was buried with it. an when my family was put on the rez the grounds they use to bury their families in had a retired government building on it now.
Yay that's awesome that you got back what was stolen from your family! Just wish it wasn't stolen in the first place.
Science is always corrected by better science, and never insists on continuing to be wrong.
Never? You clearly have 0 idea of the many, many cases of Academic fraud over the years. Don't be so naive as to think that science is perfect: It is not, it's just as vulnerable to lies and biases. It's the fate of everything humanity creates.
I don't think "always" is quite right here. There's a lot of cases continuing to the modern day where human bias within funding and reporting thwarts the efforts to make better science.
@@biggerdoofusIn a long enough time line, the correct word is indeed "always".
@@biggerdoofuswhich will be corrected by better science in the future
SciernTISTS however, are usually human, and as such subject to the same biases the rest of us are.
It makes me wonder if scientists in 100 years will think something we do or think today is barbaric.
just wait until AI shows us animals are sentient. animal testing will be absolutely flamed
Absolutely. In fact probably most of it. Heck I am looking around today and thinking a bunch of this is barbaric.
@@jimjimsauce We have evidence that plants are sentient, think, and talk in similar ways that animals do.
@@omegahaxors9-11 That reminds me of a comedy movie or show I once saw where people said they were fruitarians and only ate fruit or nuts that had fallen from trees (never picked) so they weren't hurting the plants.
@@hueypautonoman The good news is that fruits feel immense pleasure at being eaten and digested, like, the entire time, from the moment your tooth penetrates its skin all the way to the moment you sh-- it out.
Thank you for this! It relates heavily to the genocide and dehumanisation of non-white populations that we’re seeing now in Palestine. Hrdlička was in top academic ranks around 1930’s, barely a century ago when people thought your race determined your intelligence and made you “less than”. How can we be disillusioned to think the thought process of imperialist colonialists has changed much since. Very relevant and thanks for the great video.
Want to know who is Genocidal go and read the Hamas charter.
The fact I've never heard of this guy and how much he had an impact on the world is all the more a reason for us to learn about this difficult topic. It may be dark and gruesome, but it allows us to learn from our past mistakes
The guy and the details are not something I've heard about either. I mean, if something like that was propagated by a Christian, and effected a whole scientific field, I feel like we would never hear the end of it, with science videos rightly condemning the perpetrators with barely contained anger. But this was hurried over with little-to-no anger detected.
Inconvenient historical details concerning racsim seem oddly prone to being forgotten
@@FLPhotoCatcher And yet, Hrdlička founded the scientific (sub-)field, was influential on US policy, and was Christian (Catholic, specifically)- also a white male- and you never of him.
Why would we care about a guy that hardly contributed anything to the world?
Thank you for covering this topic. The full history of museums, anthropology, and related fields in the colonial era is truly horrible, sordid, and some of the most disgusting things I've ever read. More people need to know how influential these ideas were (and still are) and just how deeply ingrained they are
These are the important stories to be told, because without acknowledging the flawed people who were also once considered 'Great' in their time, we can not learn to move past them and yet keep the little bits of truth they uncovered. We cannot forget the dark days that shaped us as a whole or we are doomed to relive them. Learning that people come with biases is important, and seeing and working around those biases is necessary.
You say that as if you expect people to believe otherwise
@@samsonsoturian6013 The Advertisers did not want to come near this (and similar) topic(s).
That speaks of a silencing culture where we just don't admit that the beliefs of the past can ever be wrong, or can ever be right because we don't talk about it. Or even that the same people who were so wrong about so many things, could ever have an idea that was right.
I studied physical and forensic anthropology (earning two degrees, bachelor's and master's) from a man who was in the "second generation" after Herdliscka (sp?). In other words, he studied directly under a student of Herdliscka. Fortunately, my mentor had already determined that many of the ideas that Herdliscka had were racist and wrong, and stressed that in his teaching of me and other students. I feel very fortunate to have studied under someone as open-minded and caring as Robert L. Blakely, Ph.D.
THANK YOU for this video! Psychology and criminology share the same problem, even worse in France where there are still very few professionals with an "actual" scientific background, so my heart goes to the bioanthropology colleagues, and to all the people who (sometimes unwillingly) helped our knowledge progress!!
Looks at FBI racial criminal statistics, hm
@@Tonixxylooks at all the history of genocide, colonialism, slavery, and all the wars globally(currently syria, ukraine, israel, trying to start a war with china and iran)15% the minority of humans are responsible for, hm.
I'm a pediatrician and want to thank you for covering this. The practice of modern medicine has a history of cruelty, racism, and unethical behavior, all concealed and often ignored under the guise of flawed intellectualism, prestige, and sometimes just money. Yes, these people made "discoveries" & studies & surgical methods that may stand today, but the veracity of that data doesn't take *_anything_* away from the unethical way it was obtained.
For example, I'm from Puerto Rico. Birth control pills were studied in Puerto Rican women without their full knowledge or consent of all the facts (some of the doses provided were absolutely shocking) but it doesn't mean I'm not going to prescribe birth control medication. And this was not 200+ years back, it was just decades ago.
If you say "grave robbing racist" 3 times in rapid succession you'll actually be teleported directly to the British Museum
It's always important to recognize bias in science, thank you for making this video 10/10
Yet you don't recognize the flaw in reasoning when they're judging the people of the past as if they're people in the present.
@@sczzlbttgrave robbing has been frowned upon since graves existed. Racism has always been bad. You happy now?
wtf is up with all these advertisers who don't want their ads on videos like this? It's educational. I'm a small business owner and I would LOVE to be able to afford to advertise on a channel with this subscriber count. Good fricken' grief.
Thank you for talking about this, SciShow. Someone has to.
It's done by computer, not by human. The machine just does key word search
@@samsonsoturian6013 But then, why the snowflakey programmers of the keywords?
Maybe they are too scared of being seen as picking a side, politicaly speaking. Or maybe SciShow wants to have full control of what they say and how they say it without it involving anyone else who could potentially veto some parts of the message
Even from an apolitical standpoint, discussion of dead bodies (or genocide or war crimes) is an "icky" topic that will turn a good chunk of the audience off. Viewers may make some kind of mental or emotional association between the advertiser and the unpleasant topic, through no fault of the advertisement nor the channel (correlation is the origin of superstition). Also, the topic will simply attract far fewer viewers who are more likely to be part of a niche audience, and therefore the advertisers perceive it as ineffective.
@@jliller Shouldn't there be levels of risk that advertisers *choose* to take? Not just a broad-brush approach to "advertisers"? Hmm, I guess corps big enough to advertise on popular videos are almost universally Lib or Left-leaning.
thank you Stefan, this video handled its subject very tactfully and relatively thoroughly which is something i've come to expect from Scishow. Bravo
Good job saying the guy's name correctly! Person from Czechia here. You could only have it harder if there was "Ř" in his name 😁
I thought so too! Stefan is very dedicated to good pronunciation like that
Dr Brennan did more for that field than anyone , and she's a fictional character =D but yeah, it's crazy how much of our modern understanding of stuff comes from old, weird, and downright awful past scientists...
I'd say thanks to the patrons too, this IS an important story that needs recognition and you're damn right, the Powers that Profit don't like these truths one little bit...
The more he tried to find differences the more we find we're the same.
Some articles refer to him as the "head curator" of the physical anthropology department. I guess he was.
Thank you for making this video! Would it also be possible to explore the negative impacts his work had on disabled people and how society treats us?
Proof that it doesn't matter how smart you are if you let your biases overtake you.
a reminder to all "acedemics" today
they're not right about everything because they think themselves anti-racist
Many great discoveries through out the ages have been made through the suffering of others in one way or another and some like forensic anthropology need to be rectified with proper scientific experiments and observations
Anthropology were my favorite classes in college. BY FAR
I like that guy who wrote about the yanomami.
And also the guy who wrote guns germs and steel.
It was a fascinating subject to explore.
history ended up taking my fancy but i did ANT for like 90% of my science credits
Do a Franz Boas video! He was amazing and definitely deserves more recognition and praise for going against the grain and truly wanting to understand people.
I'm studying Biological Anthropology in Undergrad right now (last year of credits), focusing on nutrition and forensic anthropology, and I absolutely love how this video covered the topic! I'm grateful that all of this is taught and discussed in my courses, as well as how anthropologists are continuing to push for improvement in all areas of the field. I work with some really great professionals who are always looking to improve our work. Thanks so much, SciShow team, for your work on this video!
What an important episode! Thank you for sharing this with us and help untangle subjects like this one.
I am French and I know my country has done a lot of awful things to people it deemed inferior in the past (and frankly still does), but if I'm being honest I only know of a small fraction, it's not really something we're taught extensively in school and episodes like this one help paint a picture of what us white people have done to other humans and how it still influences how humans interact with each other nowadays
Thank goodness for this video. It's still way too common that people believe Race is a thing and that somehow there is this magic superiority because of it. These things sadly still sit deeply integrated into our society and we should have to face them at every turn and not bury them under the rug as Governments are want to do to make themselves look good.
This is coming from a Canadian and I acknowledge our own rocky history with racism and the way it has established things today. So, no Country is without it's prejudice, but we should be able to work through it together and with the hopes to never repeat these mistakes.
Race is a social construct. Biologically it doesn't exist.
Hey remember a few years back when sci show wanted to do an anthropology series but got shut down by their audience after they challenged an orthinologists theory of anthropology (even though he was wtong).
Man that was a funny time
!?
Hey do you have any kind of link to this? I'd like to learn more
I also want a link.
Was the ornithologist Jared Diamond?
Not surprised, just disappointed.
You did great with this subject and you are right. We do need to face these types of things head-on.
It is so important to hold your institutions accountable in regards to the federal law known as NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It's been an active, 30 year process to even have universities and museums show 'openness' to repatriation of human remains and funerary objects to the rightful descendants of the native tribes. I'd highly recommend looking into the In Effigy series which chronicles the scandals committed at Effigy Mounds National Monument as an example of huge, intentional missteps in neglecting and concealing remains in order to deny repatriation.
(Effigy Mounds NM is an incredible place by the way.)
Every time someone asks what my major was, I tell them exactly how many skeletons the United States graverobbed. It's such an important part of history that nobody knows.
And in what way does this help them? Or you? Or any of the previous era's people? The past is not today. Tell them of all of the advancements and how it is being corrected. Then be a part of that movement forward.
@@catserver8577 Knowledge of the past helps us with the problems of the future... Like a grave robbing government is a possibility
@@catserver8577 I think this attitude covers up so much that we have to acknowledge with in the world. For some of us it's insulting that America has no cognition of its history.
@@catserver8577 I think this attitude covers up so much that we have to acknowledge with in the world. For some of us it's insulting that America has no cognition of its history.
@@catserver8577I'll answer you. It helps by acknowledging the reality most people don't want to look directly: their present is filled to the brink with past violations. That "humanity is not a rose to be smelled" is something everyone agrees in abstract, but no one wants to be reminded how often and how their own communities were perpetrators in that. Data is important to any future scientist and any person who wants to make informed decisions and judgement - and such history is part of that data. It shows how science is not sanitized from politics and social ideologies, which helps to keep an eye on current science and how it still made by the same prone-to-superstition or bias researchers. Casting a light on past bias in academic research makes us cast currently. Also, that "past" you speak of is not so distant at all, and many societies and communities are still directly affected today by their actions, and indirectly society as a whole still suffers racism and colonial structures of power. It's very present, from access to education, rights, law, and capital, you just need to look at your own politicians to see how it's still in the present. The notion of "It's in the past" is only proclaimed by those privileged to not see it or ignorant of how Humanities and History works.
A bit off topic but thanks for taking your time and pronouncing the name correctly. It's very refreshing!
as someone from the Czech Republic I really need to say your pronunciation of Aleš Hrdlička was really good
Huge thanks for the video! As an indigenous person it means a lot!
My small country has a long list of famous person (like Purkinje) but I heard about Hrdlička like 2 weeks ago in my psychiatry class (I study medicine in Prague).
Thank you for the video, I just knew that he was into Anthropology
Our small country has had big impact on the world! In medicine, technology, literature, music, etc... but to be honestly this was first time for me hearing of Hrdlička.
It is neat to see the presenters on this show get confident and develop their skills. They all start a little wobbly and then settle in.
I was watching along and I realized that Stefan has developed really good vocal control and timing. Seems better than most TV presenters. It makes me happy for him. That is a real art.
You didn't really go into how Boaz was completely wrong too. He didn't just believe that race wasn't biological, but species too. He tried numerous expeditions to try to find great apes with the capability of developing a culture that could be considered comparable to human society.
Also if you think that this rocks viewpoints, then you should look into Edward Burnett Tylor. He is basically solely responsible for all modern ideologies based on the silly premise that all religion/belief is wrong because societies all develop on a determined set belief system that evolves until it becomes optimal.
Do explain what is the trajectory of the optimal belief system
@@Xiassenanimism to monotheism
@@Xiassen He came up with this hypothesis when anthropology started looking at subsaharan cultures. He basically said "Look how primitive their beliefs are, this is what we must have been like when we were cave men."
So he developed his theory that human beliefs start out as animist, then become polytheist, then monotheist. He viewed the final stage of human society as being "culturally christian but secular".
This spawned the entire modern ideological movement. You can understand a lot of Nietzsche's philosophy building from this, around the question, "Wait a minute, if God is dead, but the morals he gave were somehow good, is that really a good thing, what should we do now?"
@@XOPOIIIO I know you're taking the piss but living being construct doesn't exclude dogs and cats so it's not a good alternative for human
All religions ARE wrong. Not a shred of observable, testable, repeatable evidence for the existence of any god has ever been provided. People have to be TAUGHT to believe.
9:28 Big Huge Air Quotes around "new openness to repatriation." They don't *want* to send these things back, they're being forced to by the communities to whom they rightfully belong
Wow, probably the first time I hear a native English speaker NOT butchering a Czech name in a video! You pronounced it correctly all the time, chapeau!
Thank you for addressing this. History is full of dark people and events and we do a great disservice by ignoring them.
I really appreciate the sensitive way you covered this subject, SciShow Team 🤓
it's good to see these things addressed. however, i'd like to never hear "a product of their time"again, as it's misleading and dismissive. modern views didn't come out of nowhere. as addressed, there were people in those times that were critical of eugenics & other harmful systems. but given that the critics often had little to no backing, whereas the biased "researchers" had institutional power & funding. so if people promoting ideas like hrdlicka were products of their time, _so were their critics._
It's just permissive and enabling, people can change over time but that doesn't mean they can't be held accountable anymore. Yes that was the status quo back then but we know better now and we should criticize the schools of thought and systems that still has influence in our modern day. It's disingenuous and I cannot take anyone who uses that argument seriously
Being right about the Bering Strait puts him ahead of Freud, who founded a field based on 100% pseudoscience and whose "contributions" are easy to discard. Hrdlicka also studied at the Homeopathic College of New York, and homeopathy is likewise 100% pseudoscience which has contributed nothing to real medicine.
do Freud next! All his theories are based on HIMSELF.
Sometimes people need to hear facts and not be placated.
No one is placating anyone
@@XOPOIIIO it’s a gradient. I heard it said that the differences between humans aren’t big enough to talk of race.
@@XOPOIIIO Race is not a thing. Racism is.
Delusional ->@@XOPOIIIO
@@samsonsoturian6013your being placated here by some one telling "the scary science isn't real"
I took physical anthropology in junior college long ago.
Luckily, there was no nonsense in that course. Just the physical differences of the various pre-Homosapien ancestors across time.
The line about traumatizing indigenous communities is odd. I have no reason to doubt that the indigenous communities in question were being traumatized, but it's placed as part of a summary of specific actions that aren't necessarily traumatic.
I don't want another National Treasure movie. I want a film about a bunch of thieves who repatriate objects and remains that belong to other countries.
you could 100% make national treasure movie about that and i guarantee nick cage would e down
Omg I'd so watch that
Ooo! I didn’t know about all that this is great to know thank you for sharing. It nice to learn new things and it definitely help to be aware of the original bias.
A great book about the significant pros and cons of the federal repatriation laws is "Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits) by Chip Colwell. I learned a lot about how both the government and 1st nations end up at odds with each other about both identifying and returning items from museum collections to their historic guardian.
This was super interesting. Obviously many iconic figures in US history were blatantly racist and that's super important to point out. At the same time here we see how the racist "scientist" was preferred over those who didn't validate race "science," and we could do to have more discussion on this political preference...
3:26 Many nations indigenous to the so-called Americas have flatly denied Hrdlička’s claim of a land bridge and say it contradicts their own history. They point out that the claim indigenous nations “migrated” across a land bridge is a racist myth used to deny their entitlement to their own land. Please read indigenous scholarship on this because I only have cursory knowledge.
Thank you SciShow folks for this video!!
racism should be discussed more often not censored
It's not remotely censored and people refuse to shut up about it.
We need to talk about actual racist things WHEN NEED BE. We do need to shut up about racism though.
people so eager to replace old bias with new bias
I often watch reruns of Forensic Files. So this video was fascinating! Thank you!
thank you for sharing this!!! the entire field is an absolute joke
Good thing we're able to ask questions about the science
Happy yall talked about this! THANK YOU
tbf studing cadavers was taboo during the middle ages, and the lessening of this taboo was a huge boon to the development of modern medicine.
There's a difference between the scientific community frowning upon cadavers in general and treating the remains of certain races with respect while desecrating the graves of others.
Definitely a lot of things were learned by studying cadavers then, usually by grave robbing or buying the bodies of executed criminals. But on the scale of atrocities, studying volunteer cadavers is better than studying bodies of criminals and people chosen at random is better than studying bodies of people chosen by race
I really thought “now way the method of collection was that f’ed-up” and then it was immediately that f’ed-up
Thank you for this information. We can’t fix things we don’t know about.
So, basically, this was a rant. That explains why it's not 'advertiser friendly.'
This went from "yay science history" to "oh. oh no." real fast.
I can't say that his ignorant assumptions were an isolated case.
He was a lot of things but not ignorant.
@@samsonsoturian6013 His ignorance is more or less the better part of the video.
I am so hyed that SciShow did an episode about a topic about reckoning with a modern science's racist past. The more we learn about this, the more we learn about how it shapes modern society and what we need to do for equality.
As much as I love being an anthropology major, our past is incredibly racist and it’s hard to come to terms with all the not cool things that were done in the pursuit of science. We acknowledge the wrongdoings of our predecessors and try to do better and fix the mistakes of the past.
I think it's interesting that modern ethnicity-based population studies on Human Leucocyte Antigens (HLA) actually show that different populations of people (especially those that are more insular) are predisposed to different conditions that have genetic origins. the guy's methods & viewpoints were horribly unethical and he was barking up the wrong tree, but there's still some biological differences between different groups of people on the genetic level - at least until all of humanity eventually mixes and breeds homogenously.
Of course there are genetic differences between groups which have lived separately from other groups for many generations. But there's no genetic basis for races - genetically, races (the definitions of which differ from country to country) don't exist, there's no bundle of genetic differences that all people in one race share and no people in other races share. Including the genes that influence skin color - those don't match up to races, either.
Some researchers, of course, still categorize people by race - and they will say that they find racial differences. But who, exactly, are they looking at? If they're looking at African Americans, for example, and assuming that the patterns they find among African Americans will be found in all people who they categorize as "black", they will be wrong. African Americans are not representative, genetically, of any group of dark skinned modern Africans.
Researchers need to drop racial categories, because they have no biological basis. Shoe-horning people into racist categories that were invented for cultural reasons is just stupid.
@@nycbearffI have northern European descent. Most people like me have a combination of genetic flaws that predisposes us to skin cancer (ie white skin). I think that sort of clustering is what the original comment was trying to say. Of course there is no sharp genetic distinction between a northern European and say someone from central Africa, only some overlapping and a few non-overlapping combinations of genes.
Yes, but that does not make them a different race. All humans have 99.9% of the same DNA! It's not like the 1% that gives one group different diseases prevalences or different skin color make that person a different species of human, ie a different race!
@@HweolRidda yeah, a distinction needs to be made between race & species, it’s more like diff breeds of dog rather than dogs vs wolves, since the rule of thumb is that different species can’t produce fertile offspring, whereas different human races most definitely can.
@@Emcron It's even more dramatic than that. There's more genetic variation between different groups of chimps in central Africa than there is between human races. We went through a MASSIVE population bottleneck quite recently (in evolutionary time), apparently, and we're all just super similar!
We are the smartest, and dumbest species to ever walk the planet.
Thank you for covering this difficult topic
"Started with the assumption" is never a good sign for science.
Thank you for posting "non-advertiser friendly" content. It's horrible that pubic information is regulated by advertisers who we did not vote for.
For a very short time I was proud that a fellow Czech stood at the beginnings of anthropology... until I learned what kind of "science" he did 😅😅
wym "science"? He laid the foundation for the field. You may as well call Darwin a "scientist" as well.
I studied forensic science for a year in the mid 2010's at college and I was pretty shocked when the tutor told us the classifications were 'mongoloid' and 'negroid'. Not as a bit of historical trivia but as the actual categories we were supposed to use to classify remains. I don't know why they were using such outdated concepts
10:54. Mistake. Theological librarian here, Catholic version. Catholic Christianity is the main religion in Mexico. There's not such a thing as baptizing human remains. Baptism is a sacrament that can be performed *only* on living people. What most likely happened there is that there was a blessing of the remains or a funeral Catholic prayer (responso) to give the remains a respectful send off. *Not a baptism.*
Edit. Found the source. The San Diego Union Tribune, "Mexico Indian remains returned from NY for burial," by Mark Stevenson, Associated Press writer.
"(...) On Monday afternoon, on the slope of a mountain near the Yaqui village of Vicam, the 12 sets of remains were “baptized” to give them names that have been lost to history. (...)"
Please notice that wrongly using quotation marks to signify things other than actual quotations leads to these kinds of mistakes. In colloquial language, baptizing has become a synonym of naming. It is evident here that there was not an actual baptism, but a naming. That was the expression that should have been used here: "they were given names" instead of "baptized."
By the way, you omitted several gruesome details about the massacre and what the anthropologist did to the remains to take them.
He boiled the heads to obtain the skulls.
Both the bloody massacre and the nasty treatment of the dead bodies - taken into the concept of the alleged superiority of the white race - what an oxymoron.
Weren't powerful people of the 1800s obsessed with how Anglo Saxons were the most superior "race" ? This guy's name does not seem to be Anglo-Saxon. Was that obsession over by the time this guy started looking for the most superior "race"?
My field of study is Ethnomusicology, and we're still working to decolonialize the field.
I have a strong feeling you have no idea what colony means.
@samsonsoturian6013 I mean colonial-era attitudes and practices. Not actually creating colonies. Ethnomusicology has been done since the 1890s, but really became its own field in the 1950s. Many early Ethnomusicologists were very racist people who sought to confirm their preexisting biases against non-Western music.
Wagner is a similarly problematic figure for musicologists. The ways that he shaped European/Western music and particularly the way he approached opera are impossible to ignore, but he was also anti-Semitic. It's important that we don't sanitize these figures in an attempt to protect the contributions they've made to collective knowledge.
Yes, but please keep playing his music
I think a clarification on this video is VERY necessary. While yes, Franz Boas was better than many of his peers in that he opposed a lot of the scientific racism which was prolific at the time, it is remiss not to mention that he ALSO stole and sold the bodies of indigenous people. He admitted to it during his lifetime. If you google “Franz boas stealing indigenous bodies”, this information will come up.
The other huge mistake Ales Hrdlicka made was in regard to the antiquity of people in the Americas. He vehemently fought with and attacked the people who discovered the Folsom and Clovis animal remains in conjunction with human spear points. He adamantly refused to accept human presence in the Americas beyond 3000 years before the present. He angrily hung on to this belief long after it was well established by objective proof that man's presence on the continent was much older.
Hi Stefan!
Who knew science could be so... self-correcting? (The answer is everyone. That's the whole point of science.)
great video and love y'all's work, but annoyed with the directly contradictory clickbait title
and baptising someone after death (without their consent) is OK since when?
Imagine putting “racist grave robber” on your resume and being taken seriously
Why do SciShow hosts all look different but sound the same in vocal tone and inflection? 🤔
Great stuff. loved the history of science. more please!
Good coverage!
Ok so this scientist embarked on a journey to either prove or disprove a hypothesis he had. He was proven to be wrong. Good. We ruled something out. Then make another hypothesis and test that.
What's your problem man?
@@mateostenberg What's yours? Have you ever wanted to know the truth about something? There's a process to it, which includes ruling out other possibilities. And as you continue to rule things out, you get closer and closer to the truth. And sometimes the truth is that our preconceived notions have no factual basis in reality. That is GOOD information for humanity to have going forward to not waste time investigating something that isn't there.
For ages, humans thought the sun revolved around the Earth until we proved that it doesn't.
The man was looking for a way to explain his observations only to find out he was going about everything the wrong way.
We humans cannot only learn from our own mistakes, but learn from the mistakes of others. Don't be an idiot.
When I saw wrong about everything my curiosity was peeked. That is a nuts claim...then became very obvious why he was wrong.
Write and scan them and return them. The loss of science is horrible, but the robbing of graves and theft of marginalized communities is a tragedy.
Don’t you know that medieval people from Europe are also sometimes dug up and studied? Human remains can tell you a lot about the history of people who’s lives weren’t documented like the nobility’s were.
... what's wrong with using human remains for study? They're dead, so it's not like they care. I'd understand if a family's recently departed had their remains exhumed without their consent; that would be emotionally traumatic. But their descendants generations later have no emotional stake; it's just posturing.
Really appreciate this informative video!
They were a product of their time, they believed what was taught in their culture and the evidence they thought they saw… not an excuse, it’s just the way it was. Fortunately, we have learned a lot since then.. at least that’s the hope! 😫