Alphonse Bertillon, son of the physician and founder of the Society of Anthropology of Paris, is credited as the father of anthropometrics based on his classification system known as the “anthropometric system” or “judicial anthropometry”.

Alphonse Bertillon began his career working for the Paris police in the criminal records department. It was here that he recognised a problem – it was becoming increasingly more challenging to identify repeat offenders, as the criminal records were stored alphabetically and many criminals were devising aliases to avoid severe sentences. To solve this issue, Bertillon devised a new classification system based on anthropomorphic measurements with the assumptions that bone density is fixed past the age of 20 years, and human dimensions are highly variable.

Ancient Anthropometric Measurements

The ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece, and Egypt primarily used anthropometric measurements for cultural purposes (e.g., artwork) to represent beauty, power, and other desirable attributes of the human form. Symmetry was particularly desirable, and units of measurement often consisted of the “width of a human hand” or length of a human foot”.

Anthropometrics Measurements during the renaissance

Artists during the renaissance applied anthropometric measurements to artistic works by applying human proportions. One of the most famous examples, is the works of the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci (depicted below with the famous Vitruvian Man), who obtained measurements of the human body by analyzing cadavers. Other artists relied on live models and historical achieves to obtain accurate anthropometric measurements.

20th Century Anthropometrics

In the twentieth century, a subdiscipline of anthropometrics, known as “morphometrics” was established to describe variations in size and shape of humans within distinct populations. This method involves the application of multivariate statistics to analyze various biological landmarks to obtain characteristic shapes, ratios, or angles. Today, the use of computers has resulted in the evolution of morphometrics into the field of geometric morphometrics which uses powerful computational modeling to analyze various characteristics. Today, one of the most common applications of geometric morphometrics is in the evaluation of bone density.