In 1784, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, who wrote many comparative anatomy memoirs for the Académie française, published the Mémoire sur les différences de la situation du grand trou occipital dans l’homme et dans les animaux (which translates as Memoir on the Different Positions of the Occipital Foramen in Man and Animals). Six years later, Pieter Camper (1722-1789), distinguished both as an artist and as an anatomist, published some lectures containing an account of his craniometrical methods, and these may be fairly claimed as having laid the foundation of all subsequent work.
Pieter Camper invented the "facial angle", a measure meant to determine intelligence among various species. According to this technique, a "facial angle" was formed by drawing two lines: one horizontally from the nostril to the ear; and the other perpendicularly from the advancing part of the upper jawbone to the most prominent part of the forehead. Camper claimed that antique statues presented an angle of 90°, Europeans of 80°, Black people of 70° and the orangutan of 58°, thus displaying a hierarchic view of mankind, based on a decadent conception of history. This scientific research was continued by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) and Paul Broca (1824-1880).
It has been explained that the measurements were first made with a view to elucidating the comparison of the skulls of men with those of other animals. This wide comparison constitutes the first subdivision of craniometric studies. It is further remarkable that among the first measurements employed angular determinations occur, and indeed the name of Camper is chiefly perpetuated in anthropological literature by the facial angle invented by that artist-anatomist.
Camper's work followed the lines of 18th century scientific theories, where his measurements of facial angle were used to liken the skulls of non-Europeans to those of apes.
In the 19th century the names of notable contributors to the literature of craniometry quickly increased in number. While it is impossible to analyse each contribution, or even record a complete list of the names of the authors, it must be added that for the purposes of far-reaching comparisons of humans to other animals, craniometric methods were used by Paul Broca (1824-1880), founder of the Anthropological Society in 1859 in France, and by T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) in England. By comparing skeletons of apes to man, Huxley backed up Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, developing the "Pithecometra principle" which stated that man and ape were descended from a common ancestor.
Along with the work of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who became famous for his now outdated "recapitulation theory" according to which each individual mirrored the evolution of the whole species during his life, these researches on skulls and skeletons helped liberate 19th century Europe from its ethnocentric biases. [2] In particular, Eugène Dubois' (1858-1940) discovery of the "Java Man", which was the first specimen of Homo erectus to be discovered, in 1891 in Trinil in Indonesia, demonstrated mankind's deep ancestry outside Europe.
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