a month ago, the archaeologist Jonathan Lindström in the tv and proudly showed up their dna profile: the closest to a copy of the one taken out of a 5,000-year-old grave in the middle of Sweden. The mix, something like: a part istidsjägare, a part stenåldersjordbrukare, three parts indoeuropé.
the Point was to show that our ancestors certainly arrived immigrant from different places and in different times, but to the homogeneity of the genetic heritage that characterises the Nordic countries are the closest to the uniquely high.
familiar. It coincides almost exactly with the last century’s most notorious Swedish skallmätare, the physician and anatomist Gustaf Retzius, came to the conclusion in their research. In 1898, he conducted a comprehensive study of the skallmått and length among conscripts, and the result matched amazingly well with the image of his previous studies of the archaeological material given. The northerners emerged as the ”cleanest” the remainder of ”the old germaniska peoples”.
the Enthusiasm over this inference would rise with the years, especially among German colleagues, who were much more speculative and ideological bent than he himself. Retzius skallmätningar came to be a building block in the rise of the nazi worldview.
So where was Gustaf Retzius yourself? Maybe not quite where you wanted to place him yet. Admittedly, Nils Uddenberg, given its new, extensive biography on him, the brutal title ”Skallmätaren”, but the book is in many ways as soon as a kind of scientific äreräddning. Essentially, it was the Retzius researchers, no rasaktivist.
also surprisingly interesting. He was not some backward-looking, in younger days, on the contrary, a framstegsman, liberal and modern. He was highly critical of the church and of the royal family and faithful darwinist, sympathetic to kvinnosaken and engaged in such social issues and school development.
He was, moreover, the anthropologist, traveled all over the world, and contributed both money and thousands of artifacts to the Ethnographic museum’s collections. He wrote poetry and painted watercolors, set of course in the Academy of sciences but was elected in 1901, also in the Swedish academy.
Had his creative and social skills have been greater, and the development chosen a different path, it is not impossible that posterity seen him with more appreciative eyes, a prominent, oscariansk renaissance man.
But something happened, and Retzius com total out of step with the times.
wealthy, married with Anna Hierta, daughter to Aftonbladet’s famous founder Lars Johan Hierta, and after him, he had had considerable wealth in the nest. Anna and Gustaf was powerparet in Stockholm’s high society, they are used in the current haunted house where they held omskvallrade and sought after salons.
When Hiertas Aftonbladet been taken over by a conservative owner went Retzius 1884 simply in and bought the entire magazine to bring it to the svärfaderns liberalism. He committed a series of passage of the young pens, Gustaf af Geijerstam and Oscar Levertin – but soon realized that he was not so fond of the passage rabulism as he thought. The new writers went out as fast as they were taken in.
In a similar way, it went on a number of other areas. Gustaf and Anna wanted to do good in their own way, donated lots of money, but it conflicted constantly with the other; he with scientific colleagues, she frontfigurer in the women’s movement, from Ellen Key to Selma Lagerlöf. Over the years, the two spouses also increasingly rigidly conservative, especially in the sedlighetsfrågor, but schisms seem to have bottomed out in the single, personal maktlystnad which happily resulted in the ugly intrigmakeri.
the first world war, they had managed to get the right bad seen in many circles and was raw and hard in the liberal press.
Uddenberg parts criticism of Gustaf Retzius pampfasoner, but also points to his merits as an internationally acclaimed researchers, among other things, that the mapper of the then fairly unknown nervous system.
It is also not so easy to dismiss Retzius as a racist. Despite the fact that many tried to engage him for the new rasbiologins thing, he almost always both itself and the uncertainty of their science against the political ideas in overconfidence. His intentions were probably not less pure than that of our time, the dna researcher, yet he ended up on the wrong side of history.
Uddenberg admits that he from the start saw myself Retzius as something of a petrified dinosaur, but during the work time he saw a living man – an almost tragic figure who fell victim to the caste in a period of transition and for their own shortcomings.
make the same exciting journey. It can sometimes feel unnecessarily long, with their love of small detours can Nils Uddenberg be a somewhat challenging tour guide, but above all, he is an entertaining storyteller and a brilliant folkupplysare. He not only keeps up a destiny without signs also the image of a whole epoch, whose happy faith in progress would soon lead towards darkness, and the final disaster.
A time not so unlike our own that you would like to believe.