“Geographical Distribution Patterns of Various Genes”: Genetic studies of human variation after 1945

After WWII, physical anthropologists and human geneticists struggled hard to demonstrate distance from 'racial science' and 'eugenics'. This was a crucial factor in the 'revolution' of physical anthropology in the 1950s, as contemporary accounts referred to it. My paper examines the apparent turn during this period from anthropometric measurements to blood-group analysis, and from 'races' to 'small endogamous populations', or 'isolates', as the unit of study. I demonstrate that anthropometry and blood-group analysis were used simultaneously and in the same research projects until the 1960s. Isolated populations were the new target groups of human population geneticists, from large continental groups to small village populations. Colonial infrastructures provided suitable conditions for these kinds of transnational research projects. I argue that this new framework helped to translate much of the content of earlier racial studies into a less attackable approach to human variation.