And the people who are still here, above the caves and the cenotes and the cold dark underground water of the Yucatán Peninsula, have always known it too.

The Debates That Science Inherited From Skull Measurements

The morphological controversy that Naia’s skull helped to address did not emerge in a scientific vacuum.

It had a history — a long and sometimes uncomfortable history in which the measurement of ancient skulls was entangled with racial science in ways that legitimate researchers eventually had to disentangle from genuine scientific questions about population history.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced extensive literature on cranial measurements and their relationship to racial categories — a literature that was used to support hierarchical and racist frameworks that have since been thoroughly discredited.