Collection of old skulls illustrates American diversity

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Bioarchaeologist Pamela Geller has spent years studying a collection of almost a thousand human skulls accumulated in the 1800s by Samuel George Morton. He was a physician and naturalist, and a scientific racist who subscribed to the now long-debunked belief system that races were biological facts and could be arranged hierarchically.

Morton and his colleagues “were mostly white, Christian men of some financial means,” Geller writes, while the people whose remains they archived as objects mostly were not. Morton and his ilk turned human beings into specimens, cataloging supposed biological inferiorities and using them to support their pseudoscientific arguments.

But the collection Morton amassed, Geller writes, stands today as “an unintended testament to the diversity of the U.S. population during a tumultuous moment in the nation’s history,” leading up to the Civil War.

This week, we also liked articles about compensating kids who go viral in their parents’ videos, electing new popes, and what’s endangering Florida’s manatees.

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Maggie Villiger

Senior Science + Technology Editor

Illustration of just one of almost a thousand skulls Morton and colleagues collected. Crania Americana by Samuel Morton

Hundreds of 19th-century skulls collected in the name of medical science tell a story of who mattered and who didn’t

Pamela L. Geller, University of Miami

Marked with numbers, demographic information and provenance – though not name – these skulls tell a story of racist hierarchies but also diversity in the early United States.

Rocks can hold clues to history dating back hundreds of millions of years. Christine S. Siddoway

Evidence from Snowball Earth found in ancient rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak – it’s a missing link

Liam Courtney-Davies, University of Colorado Boulder; Christine Siddoway, Colorado College; Rebecca Flowers, University of Colorado Boulder

Geologists found evidence in the way enigmatic sandstones called Tava formed in the Rocky Mountains hundreds of millions of years ago.

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US states are finally starting to put in place protections for the kids of family vloggers

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