[The Conversation Africa] The discipline of physical anthropology has a dark, often fraught past. It was misused to justify slavery and even genocide. In this edited extract from the introduction of his new book, Bones and Bodies: How South African Scientists Studied Race (Wits University Press, 2022), Alan G. Morris examines the discipline's South African history. He points out that modern academics struggle to find ways to balance the roles of sociology and genetics in their research - and that understanding how scientists previo
