Nazi race science has been revived in Britain and is now being enthusiastically promoted in the cause of anti-racism

It seems almost beyond belief, but the practice of measuring noses and skull shapes is being used in modern Britain to try and assign individuals to strict, racial categories

One might have hoped that attempts to allocate people to certain racial groups according to the shape of their head or length of their nose had ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. In recent years though, this practice has been growing in Britain, pioneered, oddly enough, by those who claim to be progressive and anti-racist! Nazi scientists measuring the facial proportions of a gypsy may be seen above.

In the United Kingdom, strenuous efforts are being made in some quarters to prove that black people have always lived in the British Isles and that their presence dates back thousands of years before the arrival of the first wave of post-war immigration from the Caribbean in the later 1940s. This, it is felt, will help everybody in the country to accept that diversity is no new phenomenon, but rather part of the tapestry of British history from the earliest times. It is clear that this kind of thing might enhance the self-respect of black children, but to achieve the goal, a certain amount of deception is required. There is of course no actual evidence of any black Africans in the country before the sixteenth century, and then only the occasional musician or servant, so the old, and thoroughly discredited, system of craniometry has been resurrected for the twenty-first century.

Let us look at this willingness to use the tools of racism in the cause of anti-racism. The Nazis were very fond of measuring parts of people’s bodies so that they could decide to what race they belonged. This was a popular means of assigning people to their proper place in the order of things, whether as Aryans or Jews, Slavs or Gypsies, Alpine Europeans or Mediterraneans. The Germans of course did not invent this nonsense, it was popular all over the world. The calculation of Cephalic Indices, by dividing the length of a skull by its width, was at one time accepted as having at least some validity, although its use plummeted after 1945. The pseudo-science of craniometry has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years though, which ties in neatly with the current efforts to prove that black people have lived in Britain for thousands of years.

After the end of the Second World War, the mania for trying to establish somebody’s race by using callipers and a ruler to measure noses or parts of the skull came to be seen for what it was; little better than the Victorian practice of reading a man’s character and disposition by means of phrenology. It was in any case hopelessly discredited by the very fact that the Nazis made such extensive use of techniques of this kind when working out which citizens were Aryan and distinguishing them from others who were subhuman. The results of measuring a cephalic index could mean the differences between life and death. In other words, such measurements were at best pointless and at worst used for wicked purposes.

Readers may be surprised to learn that a form of craniometry has now been rehabilitated and is being enthusiastically embraced by campaigners for anti-racism. To see the return of callipers and careful measurement to determine the racial group to which a human skull ought to be assigned is more than a little disconcerting. To understand how racial classification of this kind has made an unwelcome return, a little background information will be necessary.

Consider the case of the so-called Ivory Bangle Lady. In the northern English city of York in 1901, a stone coffin was unearthed. It dated from the 4th century AD, the time when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, and contained the skeleton of a young woman, together with various grave goods. Among the items found in the coffin were ivory bangles, a glass bracelet and a mirror. These all suggested that the body had been that of somebody of high status and not a slave or ordinary working person. It was the presence of the bangles which caused the remains to be labelled in later years the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’. Let us see now how this skeleton has become transformed into something of a leitmotif for modern Britain.

Three tricks are used to persuade the gullible that black people were living in Britain 2,000 years ago. One of these is linguistic, another relies upon the pseudoscience of craniometry. The final technique is bare assertion, in which the presence of sub-Saharan Africans in a country at some time in the past is simply stated, and expected to be accepted, as fact. An article published on the website of the BBC, the national broadcasting service in the United Kingdom, during the Black Lives Matter disorders in Britain which followed the death of George Floyd, illustrates all three methods as commonly used. The piece was headed ‘The black British history you may not know about’ and was put together with the help of a young woman called Lavinya Stennett, who was campaigning for more emphasis on the history of black people to be included in the curriculum used in Britain’s state schools. Although this first appeared on the BBC website in June 2020, it is still there today, so presumably the BBC believe it to be accurate. A link is given to this below. The passage relating to the Ivory Bangle Lady is as follows,

Some might think the first black people in Britain arrived from Britain's colonies - the countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia that Britain ruled over, in some cases for centuries - after World War 2. But that's not true, says Lavinya from The Black Curriculum.

"We know that black people were in Britain since Roman times - and there's specific examples." The Ivory Bangle Lady is the name given to remains discovered in York in 1901 which are now on display in the York Museum. Archaeological analysis reveals that although she was born in Roman Britain, she's likely to be of North African descent.

The remains have been dated to the second half of the 4th Century. She was found with jet and elephant ivory bracelets, earrings, pendants, beads, a blue glass jug and a glass mirror. In other words, she wasn't poor.

"It puts into question assumptions that black people have never been aspirationally wealthy or had any kind of wealth," Lavinya says. (BBC, 2020)

Let us look first at the linguistic devices used in this passage. We note, for instance, the use of the phrase, ‘elephant ivory’. Ivory is almost invariably from the tusks of elephants. Very rarely, objects have been carved from the tusks of walrus or the horns of narwhals, but in general, unless otherwise specified, ivory means elephant tusks. Putting the word ‘elephant’ before ‘ivory’ might look odd and superfluous, but it serves to suggest a connection with Africa. Describing the woman as having come from North Africa reinforces this point. When this is combined with statements such as, ‘We know that black people were in Britain since Roman times’, which is a classic case of bare assertion, the stage is set for the creation of an impression that we are talking of a skeleton belonging to a black African. The final piece of evidence is provided by the casual mention that, ‘Archaeological analysis reveals’ that the woman, ‘is likely to be of North African descent’. Case closed; here is strong evidence that wealthy black people from Africa lived in Britain thousands of years ago. The British newspaper the Guardian said plainly after the skeleton had been examined, a process at which we shall look in a moment, that this, ‘was a woman of black African ancestry’ (Guardian, 2010).

What are we to make of all this? Leaving aside the confident claims of black ancestry, what actual evidence is there? There are two strands of evidence in this case. Analysis of the isotopes in the teeth of the skeleton indicates that the woman did not grow up in York, where she was buried, but rather somewhere warmer and on a coast. This might have been southern England, somewhere in Europe or even North Africa. There is no way of telling. So, what made the BBC and the Guardian so confident that she was from Africa? The answer is that some people from the University of Reading in the south of England undertook to measure the bones, especially the front of the skull, and so decide what race the woman had belonged to when alive.

This is a pretty useless way of determining racial or ethnic origins, and so readers may well be tempted to raise their eyebrows at this point. Surely everybody in the field of anthropology must be aware of the shortcomings of such techniques by now? One might think so, but it is not so. The researchers at Reading University used a programme called FORDISC, which is designed to aid forensic scientists and archaeologists to determine the ethnic origins of skeletons. Obviously, if it was possible to state reliably whether the skeleton of an unknown murder victim belonged to a black person or white, somebody from East Asia or a person of mixed black and white ancestry, then this would be of inestimable use to a police force investigating an historic murder.

Using FORDISC other than within very specific parameters is all but useless. Even within those parameters, in optimal circumstances, it is successful in only one case in a hundred in divining the ethnicity of a skull (Elliott & Collard, 2009). One need only read a study which ran 200 skeletons of known ancestry through the FORDISC programme and then collated the results. The findings are damning,

The results of the analyses suggest that Fordisc's utility in research and medico-legal contexts is limited. Fordisc will only return a correct ancestry attribution when an unidentified specimen is more or less complete, and belongs to one of the populations represented in the program's reference samples. Even then Fordisc can be expected to classify no more than 1 per cent of specimens with Confidence. (Elliot & Collard, 2009).

The reason for this low success rate is no mystery and it is the same reason that Nazi attempts to measure and categorise Europeans were doomed. There are very few pure racial groups to be found anywhere in the world and certainly hardly any at all in Europe or North America. The DNA of the average African-American is about 20 per cent European. Many white Americans also have black ancestry. In Europe, ancestry is so jumbled up that it is almost impossible to draw any conclusions about ethnicity simply from measuring a person’s skull. All this makes it enormously difficult to say anything with confidence about the appearance in life of somebody whose skull one is measuring, when you have no other information about the individual. Nevertheless, the FORDISC programme has been used in Britain to advance an historical perspective for which there is literally no evidence. The so-called Ivory Bangle Lady is one example, but there are others, one of which proves conclusively how mad it is to use this method to determine ethnicity.

Another famous, and supposedly black, person from Britain during the time of the Roman Empire was the skeleton known as the Beachy Head Lady. This is from roughly the same period as the York skeleton and, just as in that case, a study of the skull led to the claim that she was a sub-Saharan African. This later unravelled in the most awkward and embarrassing way imaginable!

Some years, ago the museum in Eastbourne on the south coast of England, started looking at some old skeletons that they had stored in basement. One was radiocarbon dated to the Roman period and then for some reason a supposed expert in identifying the racial origin of skulls we've brought in to examine them. As soon as she glanced at a skull of one woman she immediately told Museum staff that this was a black person from sub-Saharan Africa. The broadcaster and author David Olusoga, in his book Black and British: A Forgotten History (Olusoga, 2017), mentions this. He related how she didn't need to measure the skull, just looked at it and said, ‘Oh, that must be a black person from sub-Saharan Africa!’ This is some rare talent, to be able to identify a black person’s skull just from glancing at it! She subsequently carried out various important measurements of the skull which confirmed her belief and a reconstruction was commissioned which showed a black woman from Africa. This may be seen below.

A plaque was placed near to where the skeleton was discovered, claiming unequivocally that this was a woman of African origin and there for the next few years, matters rested. This plaque may be seen below.

The sequel to this episode proves how utterly unscientific those old time Nazi methods really are. The museum at Eastbourne decided to cement their claim for having the remains of the first black person in Britain by sending samples of DNA to the Crick Institute, to have the ancestry analysed. There was not a trace of any kind of African DNA. It seems that the woman was from southern Europe, most likely Cyprus. (Daily Telegraph, 2023)

The plaque has now been removed from Beachy Head and the latest edition of David Olusoga’s book has all mention of Beachy Head Woman removed. Claims that black people lived in Britain at the time of the Roman occupation are still made, but it is now generally agreed that there is absolutely no scientific or archaeological evidence to support such a hypothesis.

BBC News Report (2020) The black British history you may not know about, 9/6/2020.

Daily Telegraph (2023) BBC plaque to mark earliest black Briton removed because she ‘was from Cyprus’, 25/10/23

Elliot, Marina & Collard, Mark (2009) Fordisc and the determination of ancestry from cranial measurements, London: Royal Society Publishing; Biology Letters.

Guardian (2010) African origin of Roman York's rich lady with the ivory bangle, The Guardian, 26/2/2010.

Olusoga, David, (2017) Black and British: A Forgotten History, London, Pan.