Aleš Hrdlička

Aleš Hrdlička (1869-1943), was a curator at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History from 1904 to 1941. A Czech native, Hrdlička traveled widely to collect skeletal remains and established the Smithsonian's world-renowned physical anthropology collections. In 1904, he came to head the newly created Division of Physical Anthropology (DPA) at the National Museum of Natural History, a position he held for the next forty years... and this was the guy who determined USA native american history...

In 1926, Aleš Hrdlička was an advisory member of the American Eugenics Society, which was established in the US by Harry H. Laughlin, Henry Crampton, Irving Fisher, and Henry F. Osborn to promote eugenics education programs (scientific racism) and and helped develop American eugenics laws for the US public, including marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed "unfit for reproduction".[5]

"Hrdlicka and others (J.W. Powell) made it "virtually taboo" for any anthropologist "desirous of a successful career" to advocate a deep antiquity for inhabitants of the Americas. "

In a lecture on "The Origin of Man", delivered for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cincinnati, Ohio, Hrdlička said that the cradle of man is not in Central Asia but in Central Europe, as Europe is the earliest known location where human skeletal remains have been found.

The European hypothesis fell into decline and is now considered an obsolete scientific theory...

However... until 1978

Doctors in the United States routinely performed sterilizations on <25% of Native American women...

Brianna Theobald, an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

In the 1910s, the government tried to get Native women to give birth with government physicians in hospitals, to move away from midwives and bring childbirth under the purview of the federal government instead. That’s when Native women really started to organize and formed Women of All Red Nations, WARN—the group that especially took on these sterilization abuses.

NOTES:

Theobald, Brianna (November 28, 2019). "A 1970 Law Led to the Mass Sterilization of Native American Women. That History Still Matters". Time. Archived from the original on April 26, 2022

Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970

https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_10822

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale%C5%A1_Hrdli%C4%8Dka

Selective infanticide seems to have been comparably widespread in Ancient Rome [35]

According to Plutarch, in Sparta, every proper citizen's child was inspected by their council of elders, the Gerousia, which determined whether or not the child was fit to live.[31] If the child was deemed incapable of living a Spartan life, the child was usually killed in a chasm near the Taygetus mountain known as the Apothetae.[32]

Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120), a Roman of the Imperial Period, sttes that the Germanic tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps.[37]

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883,[42] directly drawing on the recent work delineating natural selection by his half-cousin Charles Darwin,[46] although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.[51]