Thesis

L’impact biologique et social des catastrophes : bioarchéologie des victimes de peste à Martigues (XVIIIe siècle, Bouches-du-Rhône)

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Abstract

Ce travail évalue l’impact de crises démographiques de différentes natures au sein d’une société, en prenant comme exemple la ville de Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône) au XVIIIe siècle. Cette ville a été touchée par la dernière grande épidémie de peste en France, la peste dite de Marseille, qui a affecté la Provence et le Haut Languedoc entre 1720 et 1722, tuant près du quart des habitants. Cette épidémie intervient après une succession de crises (problèmes climatiques, guerres, famines et/ou épidémies) qui ont contribué à affaiblir la population. Considérant les effets que les famines, les épidémies et la malnutrition chronique peuvent avoir sur le développement et la santé des individus, nous avons cherché à mesurer l’impact des difficultés alimentaires et/ou épidémiques qui ont affecté les habitants de Martigues à différents moments de leur cycle de vie, et à évaluer le rôle des inégalités socio-économiques et de genre dans la présence des marqueurs de stress sur les individus observés. Nous accordons une attention particulière à la situation des femmes, tant d’un point de vue sanitaire qu’historique. Notre étude s’appuie sur un corpus des squelettes de victimes de la peste de 1720, à Martigues. Une telle collection ostéologique est bien adaptée à notre problématique car elle est composée d’individus contemporains entre eux, décédés dans un laps de temps très court (moins d’un an), qui ont connu les mêmes contraintes environnementales et qui ont vécu selon les mêmes règles sociales. L’observation des stress vécus repose sur l’analyse de marqueurs de stress physiologiques (cribra orbitalia, hyperostose poreuse de la voûte crânienne, hypoplasie linéaire de l’émail dentaire et stature). L’analyse du corpus a nécessité la mise en œuvre de nouveaux outils méthodologiques, tant pour mieux mesurer l’intensité des stress vécus par la population à différents âges, que pour implémenter une analyse intersectionnelle en bioanthropologie. Ces données ont été enrichies par les informations historiques contextualisant l’état sanitaire de la population étudiée, ce qui nous a permis de démontrer la représentativité de l’échantillon par rapport aux victimes de la peste et par rapport à la population vivante (distribution par sexe et par âge et composition sociale). Cela nous a aussi permis de relier les stress observés dans certaines classes d’âge aux crises démographiques connues par les textes. Les résultats, validés statistiquement, ont été analysés en recourant à des concepts issus de la sociologie (tels que l’approche intersectionnelle et biosociale) que nous avons adaptés à l’archéologie et à la bioanthropologie. Analyser les marqueurs de stress sans le filtre d’une distribution préétablie, par sexes ou par groupes d’âge par exemple, permet de mettre en lumière l’impact des rapports sociaux sur le développement biologique des individus. Notre étude a ainsi mis en évidence un lien entre une naissance dans les années de crises et l’observation d’une proportion plus élevée de marqueurs de stress physiologiques chez les individus immatures. Nous n’avons pas observé le même phénomène chez les adultes, qui ont été affectés par les stress de façon plus uniforme. Nous remarquons néanmoins que le nombre des crises traversées et leur intensité ont un impact plus important sur l’état sanitaire des individus que leur appartenance à l’un ou l’autre sexe ou à tel ou tel groupe d’âge. Les nouveaux outils méthodologiques développés à l’occasion de ce cette recherche doctoral pourront être appliqués à d’autres études. Le contexte exceptionnel de cette étude, à la fois en termes de représentativité de la collection ostéologique et de diversité des données historiques disponibles, nous a permis d’apporter ces contributions originales en bioanthropologie.

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... In many societies, men have privileged access to meat consumption, even though women are responsible for food preparation (Ginnaio, 2011;Fournier et al., 2015) and need to ingest higher quantities of animal proteins (especially in their reproductive years). A lack nutrients cause serious health problems (Touraille, 2008;Ginnaio, 2011;Fournier et al., 2015;OMS, 2016;Batista-Goulart, 2021), and can also impact the living conditions of the offspring (Koepke et al., 2018;Batista-Goulart et al., 2023). ...
Chapter
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... In the absence of written sources or lack of access to them, the skeleton may be the only remaining witness to a period of time, and the only available source of information on living conditions and resource sharing. Archaeo-anthropological studies are vital to gathering more information about female health conditions in the past and are sometimes the only source of information, since these conditions are under-represented in historical data (Batista-Goulart, 2021). ...
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Introduction General Political Background and Historiographies of Gender The “Second Wave” in Scandinavian Prehistoric Archaeology Between the Waves: The Development of Gender Archaeology in Scandinavia The “Third Wave”: Postprocessual and Alternative Approaches Final Reflections Notes References
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http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/test/archaeological-method-theory/archaeologies-of-gender-and-violence.html
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Reconsideration of some previous archaeological interpretations of gender may offer much more variability and freedom to our current understanding of gender identity. The perception of gender in archaeological interpretations commonly reflects our current social reality. In our Christian Western worldview, the traditional gender categories of men and women are based on biology and presume the primacy of the reproduction in human societies. Alternative social roles were judged as deviations by the biased majority. The extremely difficult position of homosexuals in twentieth-century Western society was caused mainly by the lack of an appropriate and commonly recognized gender category. No surprisingly, the concept of transsexualism developed in cultures that only recognized and valued two gender categories based on biological sex while the tribes in North America and Siberia had gender categories ready for such cases. In Western society, Christian norms instigated a social neglect of homosexuals mainly due to the absence of appropriate gender categories. As archaeologists, we should change our approach to the interpretation of past societies because our current gender categories do not always correspond to those of a former reality.
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This article is based on the analysis of the princely graves from Late Bronze Age to La Tene B1 in the north-alpine complex. After an initial phase of reflection on the methodology to rank a corpus covering a millennium, a second step is to ask the definition of sex and gender. The gender appears as an additional variable that can be confronted with sex. This approach shows the effectiveness of this concept which allows social interpretations of male/female relationships in north-alpine societies and renews issues.
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Manuel de Paléodémographie
Poster
Disponible en: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02463914 Divers facteurs d’inégalité, tels que le genre, la position sociale, la profession, ou l'origine géographique, interagissent et influencent sur les conditions de vie des populations (approche intersectionnelle). S’y ajoutent des facteurs environnementaux, comme les famines, les guerres ou des problèmes climatiques, qui aggravent les inégalités sociales. La plupart des études comparatives portant sur l’état sanitaire se font à partir des groupes déjà constitués (femme/homme, classe d’âge, site, période ou composition du mobilier funéraire) (Polet, 2016 ; Scott & Hoppa, 2018 ; Ubelaker & Pap, 2009 ; Vercellotti et al., 2011). Elles supposent par là-même que ces groupes sont homogènes, alors qu’ils sont composés d’individus ayant vécu des expériences différentes. Pour contourner ce biais, nous proposons d’utiliser des méthodes statistiques qui permettent d’agréger les individus présentant des conditions de vie similaires (clustering). Pour cette analyse, nous considérons les variables suivantes : cribra orbitalia, hyperostose poreuse de la voûte crânienne, hypoplasie linéaire de l'email dentaire et petite stature. La collection objet de cette analyse, les Capucins de Ferrières (Martigues, Bouches-du-Rhône, 1720-21), présente quelques avantages : elle est composée exclusivement des victimes de l’épidémie de peste dite « de Marseille », leur décès est survenu dans un temps très bref (quelques mois), et tous ces individus ont vécu ensemble, selon les mêmes normes sociales et les mêmes contraintes environnementales. Les résultats obtenus montrent que les différences des conditions de vie sont moins en fonction du sexe ou de l’âge, que des facteurs socio-environnementaux et des caractéristiques socio-biologiques des individus qui leur confèrent une vulnérabilité (frailty) plus ou moins grande. Cette étude démontre qu’une approche genrée des conditions de vie doit prendre en compte la diversité des comportements et des vécus des individus, et qu’une analyse binaire (hommes versus femmes) rend impossible l’observation de toutes ces nuances.
Article
Recent biomolecular evidence has proven that Yersinia pestis, the pathogen that causes bubonic plague, was infecting human hosts in Eurasia as early as the Bronze Age, far earlier than previously believed. It remains an open question, however, whether bubonic plague was affecting Mediterranean populations of classical antiquity. This article evaluates the textual evidence for bubonic plague in classical antiquity from medical sources and discusses methodologies for "retrospective diagnosis" in light of new developments in microbiology. A close study of Greek medical texts suggests that bubonic plague was unfamiliar to medical writers until sometime before the second century AD, when sources cited by Rufus of Ephesus report a disease that resembles bubonic plague. Rufus of Ephesus describes this disease around AD 100, and Aretaeus (fl. ca. AD 50 or 150) appears to describe the same disease as well. Intriguingly, the disease then disappears from our sources until late antiquity.
Thesis
A la fin de l'Epipaléolithique Levantin, durant la culture natoufienne (13 000-9 500 av. J. -C. , datations calibrées), certaines communautés de chasseurs-cueilleurs se sédentarisent. La nouvelle organisation de l'espace habité intègre la population des défunts. Nous avons repris l'étude des restes humains natoufiens afin d'approfondir les connaissances relatives à leurs caractéristiques biologiques, de définir leur représentativité par rapport à la population globale et de discuter des pratiques funéraires. Les sites de Shukbah, El Wad, Kébara, Erq-el-Ahmar, Nahal-Oren, Rakefet, Hayonim (grotte et terrasse) et Mallaha, où l'essentiel des squelettes natoufiens ont été découverts (N=358), font l'objet de cette analyse. Nous proposons une révision du dénombrement des individus ainsi que de l'estimation de l'âge et du sexe de chacun d'entre eux. Les caractéristiques ostéométriques, les variations anatomiques non-métriques, la fréquence des hypoplasies de l'émail dentaire et des caries, étudiées conjointement, donnent une image relativement contrastée des conditions de vie des groupes natoufiens qui partagent, toutefois, des affinités biologiques évidentes. La spécificité de chaque groupe est réaffirmée par la reconnaissances des gestes funéraires que nous avons pu préciser grâce à une interpréation ostéo-archéologique de chaque sépulture, à partir d'une documentation de terrain en partie inédite. L'analyse concomitante de données culturelles et des paramètres biologiques révèle certaines expressions de leur influence réciproque. Celle-ci concerne, notamment, la sélection des inhumés, en fonction de l'a^ge, du sexe ou de la parenté. L'évolution des différents paramètres étudiés au cours des trois millénaires qui précédent l'avènement du Néolithique est significative et doit sans doute être mise en parallège avec les variations climatiques que connaît cette période et avec des changements d'ordre social.
Article
The aim of this paper is to present the outbreak of plague occurred in Mallorca from May to December 1820. The significance of this episode must be understood in the double context in which it occurred: the impact on the Majorcan society and its relationship with new health proposals in a period of change both the way the state began to get involved in the management of public health, and the development of new paradigms in the field of medicine. We try the following topics: features of its evolution, analysis of the controversies that were generated on the nature of the disease, description of health policies undertaken to stop its expansion, and its impact outside the island. The information used comes from three sources: the writings of the doctors who were involved in the epidemic, the press of the time (Palma and Barcelona). The correspondence of the French consular representatives in the Balearic islands (Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangè-res-Foreign Office, La Courneuve, France). We consider this plague as a starting point to develop in Majorca a modern public health policy, some years before what the historians point out to cholera for the rest of Europe.
Article
The awful dimensions of the Black Death's mortality in Europe has long been examined and estimates of its death toll there have risen in the last two decades of scholarship. While there is much left to discover, the mortality of the Black Death in other areas of the world (the Near East, the Far East, South Asia, and Africa) remains, in relative terms, almost unexamined. While a number of scholars have made exemplary contributions to our understanding of the mortality of the second plague pandemic in the Middle East (1347-1844 CE), the untimely death of the pioneering Michael Dols (1977) was in many ways both the first and the last word on the subject of Black Death mortality in the Middle East. This study hopes to get the ball rolling again by approaching the question of mortality with some new tools. Starting with the basis of applying the fascinating Keeling and Gilligan (2000) plague model to the recorded death tolls, which we tested for 1400s Cairo, our main hope for advancing the field rests upon a new method we introduce here, one that uses the quintessentially Islamic character of Middle Eastern civic institutions (institutions that counted plague deaths) to quantify a phenomenon wholly untouched by scholars (mathematically at least): the flight of desperate rural refugees - i.e. those countless many - the rural majority - who fled the plague, Black Death especially, only to die of it, almost always penniless, anonymous, and utterly alone, in Middle Eastern cities that most of them had never seen before. If this first attempt shows promise, the hope is that we may be better equipped to understand the seemingly inexplicable - the astronomically high urban death tolls that have made quantification of plague mortality for the Middle East so difficult.
Article
In 1690 a plague epidemic broke out in the Kingdom of Naples and ended in March 1692. It is better known as "the Conversano plague", as Conversano, a small town in the Apulian province of Terra di Bari, was the first place to be affected by the plague. Unlike the 1656 plague, which had spread wide and far throughout the kingdom and had resulted in very high mortality rates, the 1690 epidemic hit only ten towns and remained within this Adriatic province. In 1690, in short, the disease was well-controlled thanks to a strict and strongly desired preventive policy. This policy was based on a key figure: a government official who ruled at the local level, strongly supported by the Neapolitan authorities. This paper investigates the 1690 plague epidemic, its spread and mortality, and the policy adopted by central and local government to tackle the emergency. The story of this epidemic demonstrates that at the end of the 17th century a new awareness of the importance of prevention and of the role of institutions had arisen in the Kingdom of Naples. Indeed, given the ineffectiveness of medical practice in the past, a good prevention policy was the main, if not the only, measure to be adopted in the struggle against such a terrible disease.
Article
Yersinia pestis, the etiologic agent of plague, is a bacterium associated with wild rodents and their fleas. Historically it was responsible for three pandemics: the Plague of Justinian in the 6th century AD, which persisted until the 8th century [ 1 ]; the renowned Black Death of the 14th century [ 2, 3 ], with recurrent outbreaks until the 18th century [ 4 ]; and the most recent 19th century pandemic, in which Y. pestis spread worldwide [ 5 ] and became endemic in several regions [ 6 ]. The discovery of molecular signatures of Y. pestis in prehistoric Eurasian individuals and two genomes from Southern Siberia suggest that Y. pestis caused some form of disease in humans prior to the first historically documented pandemic [ 7 ]. Here, we present six new European Y. pestis genomes spanning the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age (LNBA; 4,800 to 3,700 calibrated years before present). This time period is characterized by major transformative cultural and social changes that led to cross-European networks of contact and exchange [ 8, 9 ]. We show that all known LNBA strains form a single putatively extinct clade in the Y. pestis phylogeny. Interpreting our data within the context of recent ancient human genomic evidence that suggests an increase in human mobility during the LNBA, we propose a possible scenario for the early spread of Y. pestis: the pathogen may have entered Europe from Central Eurasia following an expansion of people from the steppe, persisted within Europe until the mid-Bronze Age, and moved back toward Central Eurasia in parallel with human populations.
Article
The most common cause of vitamin D deficiency is inadequate dermal exposure to sunlight. Residual rickets is nonadult vitamin D deficiency still evident in an adult individual, whereas osteomalacia occurs in adulthood. Previous research on the Beemster population, a 19th century rural community in the Netherlands, identified rickets in 30.4% of the nonadults between the ages of two and four years (n = 7/23). Because the sex of these nonadults was not known it was not possible to determine if there were differences between boys and girls. To overcome this gap in our knowledge, the aim of this paper is to determine if there are gender related differences in vitamin D deficiency in the Beemster skeletal collection, based on adults with residual rickets and osteomalacia. Out of 200 adults (100 females; 100 males) no cases of osteomalacia were detected. However, there were 29 cases of residual rickets (14.5%), with 21 of those cases in females (21.0%; 21/100). A complex interplay of multiple factors is proposed to have affected vitamin D levels in nonadults, including sociocultural variables such as gender-based labour norms. This research highlights the importance of continuing to explore gender-based health differences in past populations.
Article
Current research shows strong associations between adult height and several positive outcomes such as higher cognitive skills, better earning capacity, increased chance of marriage and better health. It is therefore relevant to investigate the determinants of adult height. There is mixed evidence on the effects of undernutrition during early life on adult height. Therefore, our study aims at assessing the impact of undernutrition during gestation and at ages younger than 15 on adult height. We used data from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. Exposure to undernutrition was determined by place of residence during the Dutch famine during World War II. Included respondents were born between 15 May 1930 and 1 November 1945 and lived in the northern part of the Netherlands during the famine period (n = 1008). Exposure data was collected using interviews and questionnaires and adult height was measured. Exposed and non-exposed respondents were classified in the age categories pregnancy- age 1 (n = 85), age 1–5 (n = 323), age 6–10 (n = 326) or puberty (age 11–15, n = 274). Linear regression analyses were used to test the associations of adult height with exposure. The robustness of the regression results was tested with sensitivity analyses. In the models adjusted for covariates (i.e., number of siblings, education level of parents, and year of birth) and stratified by gender, adult height was significantly shorter for females exposed at ages younger than 1 (−4.45 cm [−7.44–−1.47]) or at ages younger than 2 (−4.08 cm [−7.20–−0.94]). The results for males were only borderline significant for exposure under age 1 (−3.16 [−6.82–0.49]) and significant for exposure under age 2 (−4.09 cm [−7.20–−0.96]). Exposure to the Dutch famine at other ages was not consistently significantly associated with adult height. In terms of public health relevance, the study’s results further underpin the importance of supporting pregnant women and young parents exposed to undernutrition.
Thesis
Génératrice depuis le VIe siècle de notre ère de crises épidémiques récurrentes en Occident, la peste a profondémentmarqué l’histoire des sociétés européennes, tant sur le plan biologique que culturel, économique et politique. Sil’histoire des épidémies qu’elle a engendrées est aujourd’hui relativement bien connue, un certain nombre de questionssur ses caractéristiques épidémiologiques passées demeurent pour partie irrésolues. En particulier, le caractère sélectifou non de la mortalité par peste à l’égard de l’âge, du sexe et de l’état de santé préexistant des individus faitactuellement débat. À partir d’une approche anthropobiologique, le présent travail se propose de contribuer à cettediscussion. Il livre les résultats de l’étude d’un corpus de 1090 squelettes provenant, d’une part, de quatre sitesd’inhumation de pestiférés de la fin du Moyen Âge et du début de l’époque moderne et, d’autre part, de deuxcimetières paroissiaux médiévaux utilisés hors contexte épidémique. Cette étude révèle en premier lieu l’existenced’une signature démographique commune aux séries en lien avec la peste. Leur composition par âge et par sexe,distincte de celle caractérisant la mortalité naturelle, est au contraire en adéquation avec la structure théorique d’unepopulation vivante préindustrielle. L’examen de divers indicateurs de stress suggèrent par ailleurs que les victimes dela peste jouissaient, à la veille de leur décès, d’un meilleur état de santé que les individus morts en temps normal. Lesrésultats obtenus concourent à démontrer que les facteurs causals de ces lésions squelettiques, d’accoutuméresponsables d’une diminution des chances de survie, n’eurent au contraire qu’une influence mineure, si ce n’est nulle,sur le risque de mourir de l’infection à Yersinia pestis. Ce travail livre in fine un faisceau d’arguments convergents quitendent à prouver que les épidémies de peste anciennes furent à l’origine d’une mortalité non sélective, la maladiefrappant indistinctement les individus des deux sexes, de tous âges et de toutes conditions sanitaires.
Article
This paper shows how insights pertaining to modern malnutrition may be of use in modelling Roman malnutrition. It also points out some of the dangers and pitfalls of applying modern insights, data and a priori suppositions to the past. We approach this topic from two perspectives that challenge some of the implicit and explicit assumptions regarding the similarities and dissimilarities between ancient and modern malnutrition. First we argue that a degree of malnutrition is part of the human condition and that economic growth may only limitedly remedy it. Indications of past malnutrition are therefore of limited value in judging economic performance. Secondly we show that the nutritional value of cereals has been underestimated by historians and archaeologists, especially in terms of trace element content (colloquially: ‘minerals’), while their role in the diet has been overestimated. Both aspects have undergone great changes during the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century due to dilution due to extreme yield increases and unforeseen side effects of genetic modification. As neither Roman nor any other pre-20th century cereals could have been subject to such changes, our view on the role of cereals in Roman diet and nutrition needs to be revised.
Chapter
Debates about gender justice are now common in public policy in general and in the health sector in particular. The promotion of greater equality between women and men has become a key theme in both national and international policy debates. However there has often been confusion about what ‘equality’ means in this context and how it might be achieved. The terms ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender equity’ are both in widespread use but there has sometimes been a lack of clarity about the distinctions between them as well as their practical implications. © Ellen Kuhlmann and Ellen Annandale 2010. and their respective authors 2010
Article
Bioarchaeology as a field of study can contribute important insights to our understanding of how stress-related phenomena experienced in childhood influence later life conditions. One area that is especially effective is looking at the dental enamel surface microstructures reflecting patterns of growth and growth disruption. Since dental enamel grows incrementally, and because it does not remodel once formed, a record of growth disruption (formed during childhood) is preserved for the rest of an individuals' life. Enamel surface defects are commonly observed macroscopically as enamel hypoplasia. However, this method does not capture the smaller defects reflecting a disruption in only a few of the growth lines visible on the tooth surface. Previous approaches to the assessment of these structures have included scanning electron microscopes and polarized light microscopes with photomontaging and z-stacking capacity. This paper presents the application of the Olympus LEXT 3D Laser Measuring Microscope OLS4000 and Olympus LEXT analytical software to capture and examine dental enamel surface microstructures. The use of the LEXT for these purposes is critically assessed, and the strengths and challenges discussed. Recommendations are made for future application of this instrument to bioarchaeological research.
Article
The DSP method (probabilistic sex diagnosis) was applied to100 contemporary coxal bones from elderly individuals of the South of France. Ten variables with a posterior probability greater or equal to a 0.95 threshold were used. There was no statistical difference between right side and left side measurements. There was no mistake for sex assignment but the level of indetermination varied a great deal. It was higher in females than in males. The best combinations were obtained when using all 10 variables, some combination of 9 variables (allexcept SS or SIS or VEAC) or the first 8 variables. We conclude that the DSP method is of great interest in forensic anthropology, thanks to a very weak possibility of mistake when using the software for sex determination of the coxal bone. The main drawback is the level of indetermination that can be high depending on the available variables.
Chapter
This chapter documents human development in the very long run on the basis of anthropometric indicators used as a proxy measure of the biological standard of living. The author explores the trend in height of European populations, controlling for aspects of natural, economic, and social change. Findings include that there was a small increase in overall mean height in Europe from the 8th century BCE to the 18th century CE (c. 0.5 cm per millennium on average for the total dataset), with regional and temporal variations, including particular low points during Roman ascendancy (1st century BCE in Mediterranean Europe, 8 cm below the predicted mean) and the Little Ice Age (17th century CE in North-Eastern Europe, 7 cm below the predicted mean). Significant explanatory variables for these trends are the availability of dairy products, the share of the population living in urban areas, and the impact of the Roman Empire.
Article
Este artigo foi elaborado a partir de aula magna proferida por ocasião da abertura do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia – PPGA/UFPA em 19 de agosto de 2010. Nesse texto o autor faz uma reflexão sobre a profundidade temporal da antropologia física/biológica no Brasil, inicialmente tecendo considerações sobre sua própria trajetória como pesquisador e professor e em um segundo momento examinando o desenvolvimento histórico da disciplina no Brasil. Argumenta que um foco na história pode enriquecer o diálogo entre a antropologia biológica e os demais campos da antropologia, em particular a antropologia social, com repercussões importantesno processo de formação de estudantes de pós-graduação. Umaperspectiva histórica pode ajudar a antropologia biológica a melhor compreender os desafios da prática contemporânea da disciplina. Palavras-chave: antropologia física, antropologia biológica, história da ciência.