Earnest A. Hooton
| Earnest Hooton | |
|---|---|
Hooton
|
|
| Born | November 20, 1887 |
| Died | May 3, 1954 (aged 66) Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physical anthropology |
| Alma mater | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| Doctoral students |
Harry L. Shapiro Carleton S. Coon Arthur R. Kelly William W. Howells Frederick S. Hulse Alice M. Brues Sherwood L. Washburn Joseph Birdsell William S. Laughlin and others |
| Known for | Racial classification |
| Notable awards | Viking Fund Medal (1947) |
Earnest Albert Hooton (November 20, 1887 – May 3, 1954) was a U.S. physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape. Hooton sat on the Committee on the Negro, a group that "focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time."
Earnest Albert Hooton was born in Clemansville, Wisconsin. He was educated at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. After earning his BA there in 1907, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, which he deferred in order to continue his studies in the United States. He pursued graduate studies in Classics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he received an MA in 1908 and a Ph.D. in 1911 on "The Pre-Hellenistic Stage of the Evolution of the Literary Art at Rome" and then continued on to England. He found the classical scholarship at Oxford uninteresting, but quickly became interested in anthropology, which he studied with R.R. Marett, receiving a diploma in 1912. At the conclusion of his time in England, he was hired by Harvard University, where he taught until his death in 1954. During this time he was also Curator of Somatology at the nearby Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Hooton was known for combining a rigorous attention to scholarly detail combined with a candid and witty personal style. Henry Shapiro remembers that his lectures "were compounded of a strange, unpredictable mixture of strict attention to his duty to present the necessary facts... and of a delightful impatience with the restrictions of this role to which he seemed to react by launching into informal, speculative, and thoroughly entertaining and absorbing discussions of the subject at hand." As a result, Hooton established Harvard as a center for physical anthropology in the United States and at the time of his death most physical anthropologists in the United States were former students or instructed by one.
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