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human career and condition. Comparative morphological studies, particularly those that
are complemented by biomechanical analyses, provide major clues to the functional
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significance and evolution of the skeletal and muscular complexes that underpin our
bipedalism, dextrous hands, bulbous heads, outstanding noses, and puny jaws. The wide
variety of adaptations that primates have made to life in trees and on the ground are
reflected in their limb proportions and relative development of muscles. (Compare
Ardipithecus).
Free-ranging primates exhibit a trove of physical and behavioral adaptations to
fundamentally different ways of life, some of which may resemble those of our late
Miocene–early Pleistocene predecessors (i.e., those from about 11 to 2 million years
ago). Laboratory and field observations, particularly of great apes, indicate that earlier
researchers grossly underestimated the intelligence, cognitive abilities, and sensibilities
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of nonhuman primates and perhaps also those of Pliocene–early Pleistocene hominins
(i.e., those from about 5.3 to 2 million years ago), who left few archaeological clues to
their behaviour.

Q3. Elucidate the anthropometry under the leadership of Karl Pearson.
Ans. Under the leadership of Karl Pearson (1857–1936), (co-founder and editor of the
journal, Biometrika) anthropometry became more quantitatively sophisticated. Pearson
developed much of the mathematics (statistics) that made measuring bones and bodies
appear scientific, including computations for variation and correlation, and tests of
significance for comparing samples. Anthropology, and certainly physicalanthropology,
in the last half of the nineteenth century was strongly committed to racial determinism,
a philosophy that assumed the superiority of Caucasoid. In this philosophical climate,
the first Americans who were to become known as physical anthropologists appeared.
Frank Russell (1868–1903) receivedthe first Ph.D. in physical anthropology in America
in 1898 at Harvard. Ales Hrdlicka (1860–1943), a migrant medical student from
Bohemia, was employed by the state of New York as an associate in anthropology and
pathology. In 1896, he spent a brief period in Paris studying with LeonceManouvrier in
Broca’s laboratory. Hrdlicka was hired as an anthropologist by the United States
National Museum in 1903, where he remained a major personality in American physical
anthropology until his death in 1943. Ales Hrdlicka established the American Journal of
Physical Anthropology in 1918 and the journal still bears his name on each issue. He was
a forceful figure who argued that American Indian aboriginal populations came across
the Bering Straits from Asia in recent times. There was not, in his view, evidence of
Paleolithic peoples in the New World. Hrdlicka, perhaps because of his Bohemian
background, rejected the ideas of racial superiority and worked hard to counter Nazi
war-time dogma about race. He wanted to establish acenter or institute similar to
Broca’s famous laboratory that would be a training ground and the home of a national
society of physical anthropologists.

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