Published 14 May 2021 at 20.15
History. Modern ethnic group research that relies on DNA has shown, among other things, that Sami have only lived in Sweden for 2,000 years and that Africans are very different from the rest of humanity. But at the Swedish Institute of Racial Biology in Uppsala, a lot of this was calculated a hundred years ago.
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TODAY: After careful skull measurement, a modern forensic anthropologist has reconstructed a face by hand. The fourth picture shows the later identified dead woman.
On 13 May 1921, the Riksdag decided to establish a racial biology institute in Uppsala. In the absence of knowledge about DNA, the National Institute of Racial Biology initially relied heavily on skull measurements.
Nowadays, based on its skull shape, humans can only be divided into three main groups, which are usually called Caucasians, Negroids and Mongoloids. The medical discipline that perhaps mainly applies this division is forensic anthropology.
As can be seen from the picture to the right, the manual skull measurement has been refined over the years, and today the result can be more accurate than DNA technology can reveal about racial affiliation and appearance of a person. In the example, modern skull measurement has been used to reconstruct a face through manual work. The last picture shows the dead woman identified only later.
However, the official Swedish line is still that skull measurement is a “pseudoscience” that does not work. This teaching is the responsibility of the students in Swedish schools to sign, at least if they want to achieve the so-called knowledge goals in the subject of social sciences.
However, it was not political correctness that made the institute in Uppsala abandon the skull measurement. In the mid – 1930s, they simply began to focus more on heredity issues and in 1958 they changed their name to “Department of Medical Genetics”.
Modern ethnic group research and “DNA racial biology” still rely on genetics, which has undergone great development since the breakthrough of DNA technology in the 1980s. Through a statistical concept which is usually called genetic distance and which was developed by Cavalli-Sforza among others, one can see how closely related different ethnic groups are to each other.
Among other things, this methodology has been able to show that not everyone African peoples of the globe are more closely related to each other than to sub-Saharan Africans.
In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to use commercial genealogy databases to connect ethnic groups with DNA.
Researcher Peter Sjölund has conducted “DNA racial biology” using methodology taken from the world of genealogy. With this methodology, he has come to the conclusion that the Sami can only have lived in Sweden for 2,000 years, which is at least 8,000 years after Sweden was first inhabited by ancestors of today's Swedes in connection with the end of the ice age.
Jimmie Åkesson went out the other day in connection with the centenary and strongly distanced himself from the politically incorrect research on differences between different ethnic groups that was conducted in Uppsala.
On Facebook, he writes that we “must fight the abominable human view that divides and rates people by race “.
& copy; & nbsp; Uppsala University < Herman Lundborg, first head of the Department of Racial Biology.