Janet Mange is an associate curator and keeper of the physical anthropology section at the Penn Museum. The museum is home to one of the world's better known collections of human skulls. Samuel George Morton collected these skulls from the 1830s to the early 1850s.
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.