EVOLUTION, GENETICS, ANTHROPOLOGY — MOURANT 515 



GENETICS, ANTHROPOMETRY, AND THE FUTURE OF PHYSICAL 

 ANTHROPOLOGY 



It may be that few new blood-group systems remain to be discovered, 

 but biocliemical systems are likely to multiply considerably in number 

 in the near future. As all the methods of testing involved become 

 fully applied to anthropological material, then, even if classical 

 anthropometric methods are also fully applied, the amount of infor- 

 mation available about the inherited features of any population will 

 become preponderantly serological and biochemical, and remain only 

 in relatively small degree morphological. 



Tliis does not mean, however, that it will then be permissible to 

 neglect morphological observation, or to disregard the results of 

 past morphological measurements. There are many weighty reasons 

 for this. For one thing, apart from the results of ABO blood-group 

 tests on a small number of bodies and skeletons, the only means of com- 

 paring living populations with those of the past is by means of skeletal 

 measurements. A further reason is that the vast bulk of our existing 

 information about living or recently living populations consists of 

 body measurements. We must continue to make it possible to compare 

 the peoples of the present day, and indeed of the future, with archeo- 

 logical material, and with living populations examined during the 

 past century, but possibly now inextricably intermarried with others. 

 Quite apart from these considerations, it would clearly be wrong for 

 anthropologists to neglect just those characteristics of individuals and 

 populations by which they are identified in everyday life. 



But an understanding of the physical nature of man, and his rela- 

 tion to the rest of nature, demands more than a comparison of individ- 

 uals or populations with one another as they exist at the time when 

 the observations are made. Man has been evolving, however slowly, 

 during recent millemiia, and he will continue to evolve in the future. 

 The study of the processes of natural selection and evolution is, there- 

 fore, an essential part of the investigation, not only of ancient skeletal 

 material, but of living human populations. 



Already, as we have seen, some of the serological and biochemical 

 characters are being studied with regard to the liability of their pos- 

 sessors to suffer from certain diseases. The results of such studies 

 must ultimately be interpretable, at least in part, in terms of natural 

 selection related to features of the environment. Similarly the ex- 

 ternal characters of the body must have evolved and must, indeed, still 

 be evolving, in response to the nature of the environment. This proc- 

 ess of evolution may be slow, and the genetics involved almost inex- 

 tricably complex, but the major morphological features of the body, 

 being the ultimate results of the selective process, may be expected 

 to show, and have indeed in many cases been found to show, a close 

 relationship to certain features of the environment. 



