Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
5
A
ncestry Estimatio
n
Elizabeth A. DiGangi, Joseph T. Hefner
INTRODUCTION
Why are biological anthropologists interested in studying ancestry when the topic is mired
with controversy due to the ways race research has been used socially and politically? The
answer is simple: anthropology is at its heart the study of humankind and all its aspects,
both cultural and biological. Therefore, many early physical anthropologists were concerned
with ordering or classifying human groups into categories, in part as a way to more fully
understand humankind. As we will uncover in the pages ahead, much of this early effort
was typological,
1
assuming that different groups of people conformed to types, and in
many cases their research assumed a certain hierarchical arrangement of the various races.
Current thought regarding ancestry conversely takes a population perspective and focuses
on two primary objectives: (1) understanding the distribution of human variation; and (2)
using that variation during human identification for medicolegal purposes.
As stated above, ancestry is arguably the most controversial topic we must contend with in
biological anthropology in general, and more specifically, during the construction of the
biological profile from human skeletal remains. While this controversy has existed for
decades, we have only recently fully accepted that while race does not exist from a true
biological standpoint, it does exist from a social standpoint, a realization that must be
acknowledged. Further, while race is not biological per se, we are nevertheless able to estimate
ancestry (given the social categories in use
2
) from a number of skeletal features, most notably
from the skull.
1
All bolded terms are defined in the glossary at the end of this volume.
2
It is important to note that the social categories in use for race are cultural constructions and therefore
arbitrary. Each culture will have its own unique system to categorize what it views as the different races.
For example, the 2010 U.S. Census recognized 15 different categories (
Humes et al., 2011
), and technically
six of those are nationalities (e.g., Japanese, Filipino). Conversely, the Brazilian census recognizes five
categories in total (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, 2010). While the majority of these
categories are arbitrary with no basis in biology, it nonetheless happens that we can estimate ancestral
origin from the skull for four major categories (African, Asian, European, and Indigenous/Native
American), as will be discussed in this chapter.
