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Panel 751: Traditional and modern anthropometry

Anthropometry as an early tool in Physical Anthropology has been developed in order to get a better understanding of humans and morphological variation. It has to be mentioned that in early history of physical anthropology this tool has been used to justify the existence of so called “races” as well as to “identify” notorious criminals (e.g. Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology). Alphons Bertillon introduced anthropometry in order to identify “repeat offenders” and founded the field of criminal anthropology. Franz Joseph Gall developed in the 19th century a kind of craniometry to predict asocial behaviour. Rudolf Martin’s – he is known as the father of modern anthropology – everlasting and most innovative merit is the binding definition of landmarks and the respective standardizations. Since Cartesian coordinates have been introduced to anthropometry the traditional linear measurements have lost some power. The concept of traditional landmarks, simply “fixed points”, have been superseded by the concept of “sliding landmarks” respectively “semi landmarks” enabling a better understanding of shape. Those 3-D landmarks can be collected via micro-scribe or surface scanning. 3-D landmarks open the door to the application of the most powerful but highly sophisticated methods of New Geometric Morphometrics (Bookstein, Rohlf, Slice, Mitteroecker et al.). A new field in current Anthropometry as an additional example is the so called “Design of Functional Clothing”.

Linear measurements; landmarks; shape analysis; geometric morphometrics

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