author
Aleš Hrdlička
1869–1943
A pioneering anthropologist at the Smithsonian, he helped shape the study of physical anthropology in the United States and became widely known for his work on human origins and migration. His career also reflects the complicated legacy of early anthropology, combining major scientific influence with ideas that are debated and criticized today.
3 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in Humpolec in Bohemia in 1869, he moved to the United States with his family as a boy and later built his career there. He trained in medicine before turning to anthropology, a path that led him to the U.S. National Museum, now part of the Smithsonian, where he became a central figure in developing physical anthropology as a formal field.
Over the course of decades at the Smithsonian, he traveled widely, studied human skeletal remains, and helped build major research collections. He also wrote extensively and became especially associated with research on early humans and with the idea that the first peoples of the Americas had migrated from Asia.
Today, he is remembered as an important and influential scholar, but also as a figure whose work belongs to an earlier era of anthropology. Modern readers often encounter him both as a founder of a discipline and as part of a history that raises serious ethical questions about collecting practices and racial thinking in science.