The Washington Post continues it’s depressing dissection of Ales Hrdlicka. I wish we could say he was a forgotten relic of a benighted time, but no, some anthropologists were still celebrating his life in more recent years.
Rachel Watkins, a biocultural anthropologist, worked at the Natural History Museum in the early 2000s after the Smithsonian had reckoned with what he had done in Larsen Bay. She recalled when employees at the museum gathered around a cake to commemorate the anthropologist’s birthday more than 50 years after his death.
“He was … deified,” said Watkins, now an associate professor and department chair of anthropology at American University. “It’s like Thomas Jefferson at [the University of Virginia].”
Ugh. The old ghoul should be treated as a shameful embarrassment, but instead he’s lionized by some now as much as he was in life (he died in 1943). This newspaper article from 1926 is incredible, not only for how credulous the journalist was,but for how smugly and confidently Hrdlicka makes predictions about the future evolution of the American population — don’t worry about the flappers, they’ll be strict parents.
(You can click on this to get an enlarged article that is marginally readable.)
The modern white nationalists and racists didn’t just appear out of thin air. They’ve been here all along, provided with pseudo-scientific support from establishment scientists like Hrdlicka.
“Hrdlicka” – sounds too Slavic to be a real American.
How much of his pseudoscholarship was motivated by striving to move his own ancestry from the “them” group to the “us”?
Yikes what a painful read. What a sick monster. “The flapper of today,” he says, “appears to the world as a good-for-nothing little creature.” Makes me wanna kick something.
Fitting that the article below carries on about light traveling through “ether”.
Dennis, the final nail in the coffin for luminiferous aether was finally driven home in the 1920’s and that paper is from 1926. A quick eyestrain inducing look at that article was mentioning the study of cosmic rays on mountain tops and balloons, something observed around a decade earlier.
As for the subject of the article, sounds like a really bad hangover from the Victorian era.
girls born after 1893 only know three things: 1. jazz 2. be a good for nothing creature 3. twerk. 4. eat hot chip and lie
@1. Pierce R. Butler : Not sur ehow much difference it really makes but :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale%C5%A1_Hrdli%C4%8Dka
Also from there :
Just what the..? Why the?
Sorry to be the schoolboy but it sounds like a joke name for a drunk. (Ale being a type of beer, and ‘hard liquor’ referring to spirits.) X-D
racist
Alex Hard-liquor acted pretty much like anthropologists in Sweden did at the time.
@ ^ birgerjohansson : That was the case for Oz too for instance :
Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-39376013
A lot of elements in common with the man in the OP here.. I wonder if there was a connection between all these various (widespread?) racist corpse collectors – Berry, Hrdlička & the Swedish ones? If they knew each other, inspired each other, egged each other on in “Bone Wars” type rivalries? Clearly a common (for values thereof) and sadly seen as acceptable unacceptable fad or custom of that period.. Warped zeitgeist?
Yup. Definitively zeitgeist.
The SS Ahnenerbe even ordered crania of Soviet sergeants directly from the extermination camps.
.
BTW Nixon and Reagan were prominent members of the species. I am sure their families willnnot mind if we dig them up for science.
Also, king Leopold. Not for science, I just want to make a goblet from the skull of the murdering bastard.*
*yes, I know crania are not water-proof. That is why Ukko and the gods invented plastic passing.
Spell check strikes again. Plastic padding
birgerjohansson: given all the pollution in the waters these days, lots of us might be passing plastic without knowing it. 8-)
@ ^ billseymour : Or worse not passing plastic?
Specifcally mircoplastics :
See :
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/microplastics-found-in-human-blood-for-first-time
Plus :
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/microplastics-human-body-know-dont-know-rcna23331
In addition to :
https://www.theseacleaners.org/news/microplastics-in-human-blood-and-lungs-the-urgent-need-for-scientific-research/
His take on flappers reads like something a modern day incel would write about modern young women who, according to said incel, will end up regretting the indiscretions of their youth such as riding on the “cock carousel.”
Apparently this long-dead asshole has influenced some of the worse scumbags of our time.
^ Which may even include some tiniest pieces or partilces of Mir – the erstwhile Russian space station that is..
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4225/mir/mir.htm
Mir-co micro plastics from Mir..
@15. Walter Solomon :The more things change..
StevoR #9
He sure went through a lot of trouble trying to prove something that was taken for granted by nearly all white people at that time. Why?
@ ^ Walter Solomon : The gnawing insecurity of knowing that what he was claiming and what was commonly believed actually was NOT true? However much he wanted it to be and tried to make it be?
“The flapper of today,” he says, “appears to the world as a good-for-nothing little creature.”
…fit only to be looked down upon by good-for-nothing big creatures.
Flappers looked down upon by , urm, fappers.. So to speak. Euphemistically.
StevoR #19
Much like creationists in that regard.
@ ^ Walter Solomon : Absolutely. They can’t be satisified with just being religious / racist, they desperately want their religion /racism to have some basis in science when it doesn’t have that.
Not meaning to hog the thread, sorry, but just seen that Charly has an interesting post on Aleš Hrdlička here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/affinity/2023/08/17/ehm-akshually-hrdlicka/
on the Affinity blog which is worth reading here.