In two distant centuries — the mid-1800s and the early 2000s — scientists mobilised collections of roughly a thousand human samples in an attempt to understand human diversity. One collection consisted of skulls, gathered through colonial networks, war, and grave-robbing, measured with lead shot by an American physician determined to rank the world’s “races.” The other consisted of sequenced genomes from individuals around the globe, gathered through informed consent and international collaboration, designed to decode the origins of genetic variation and dissolve the biological foundation of race itself.
These two datasets — Morton’s thousand skulls and the 1,000 Genomes Project — lie at opposite ends of the scientific and moral spectrum. Yet together, they illuminate how the tools, ethics, and ambitions of human science have transformed across the past two centuries. They also show how “a thousand samples” can be used either to construct a hierarchy of humanity or to demonstrate our vast, interconnected sameness.
This is the story of how two projects, separated by 170 years, used roughly the same number of human samples to reach diametrically opposite conclusions.
I. The Age of Skulls: Samuel George Morton and the Birth of Statistical Racism (1830s–1850s)
In antebellum America, physician and naturalist Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) set out to measure the cranial capacity of human skulls gathered from around the world. By the time he died, his collection numbered nearly 1,000 crania, one of the largest human osteological archives in existence. To his admirers, Morton was a meticulous empiricist. To history, he became one of the founding architects of scientific racism.
Morton’s method
Morton filled skulls with mustard seeds and later lead shot to measure internal cranial volume, believing that skull size indicated innate intelligence. This belief did not originate in his measurements; it stemmed from the racial ideology of his time, particularly among white elites invested in slavery. Data became a tool for reinforcing social hierarchies.
A biased sample born of empire
Morton’s skulls came from:
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enslaved Africans and their descendants
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Native Americans displaced by colonial wars
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ancient Egyptian mummies taken during European expeditions
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scattered European remains
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individuals denied identity, autonomy, and consent
There was no statistical design. No representative sampling. No consideration of nutrition, trauma, health, or body size. These skulls were not “the world’s peoples,” but rather fragments of colonial domination.
The hierarchy he wanted to find was the hierarchy he “found”
Morton’s measurements were often accurate — a fact that makes his legacy more troubling. Even with decent numbers, his interpretations were drenched in bias:
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Europeans → largest skulls → “highest intelligence”
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Native Americans → intermediate
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Africans → smallest → “least developed”
Morton’s work became a weapon in pro-slavery arguments, a “scientific” justification for human inequality.
His thousand skulls helped create a racial worldview, one that treated humanity as separate, ranked species.
II. The Mismeasure of Bias: Revisiting Morton with Modern Tools
In 2011, researchers re-measured over 300 of Morton’s skulls. They found no evidence that Morton falsified measurements. The problem was deeper: he interpreted unbiased data through biased assumptions. By treating race as fixed, innate, and hierarchical, he transformed skulls into “evidence” of inequality.
This contrast — accurate measurements, disastrously biased conclusions — is central to understanding how science can go wrong even when data itself is sound.
III. The Genomic Revolution: The 1,000 Genomes Project (2008–2015)
More than 150 years after Morton, a new scientific endeavour was launched — also using roughly a thousand human samples, but with radically different goals, methods, and implications.
Why sequence 1,000 genomes?
By 2007, genome-wide studies had mapped common human variants, but rare variants remained elusive. To detect variants with frequencies as low as 0.1%, scientists needed a dataset of approximately 1,000 individuals. This was not numerology or convenience; it was population genetics.
A global, ethical, representative sample
Where Morton’s skulls came from colonial violence, 1KGP genomes came from:
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volunteers
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informed consent
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ethical review boards
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collaborative agreements
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anonymized, open-access protocols
Populations were intentionally selected from:
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Africa
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Europe
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East Asia
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South Asia
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the Americas
Each with 100–300 individuals to capture population-specific rare variants.
This was not a dataset of domination; it was a dataset of collaboration.
Low-coverage sequencing: a technological innovation
Instead of deeply sequencing each genome, researchers sequenced at low coverage (2–6×) and used statistical imputation to reconstruct variants. This allowed broad, global sampling without enormous costs.
Thus, the number “1,000” emerged from scientific necessity, feasibility, and statistical power — not ideology.
IV. Two Opposite Visions of Human Diversity
The most profound difference between Morton’s and 1KGP’s “thousand samples” is philosophical.
Morton’s worldview: race explains humanity
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fixed racial categories
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hierarchical “types”
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biology as destiny
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“difference” as a deficiency
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data used to justify inequality
1KGP’s worldview: humanity explains variation
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continuous genetic diversity
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no discrete biological races
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overlapping allele distributions
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shared ancestry across continents
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data used to challenge racial essentialism
Where Morton tried to prove that races were separate species, 1KGP demonstrated that human populations are genetically interconnected — that variation exists, but does not map neatly onto racial categories.
In other words:
Morton used 1,000 samples to create the idea of race.
1KGP used 1,000 samples to dismantle it.
V. The Moral Arc of Measurement
The history of human science can be read as an evolution in three acts:
Act I: Measure to rank
(19th century)
Skulls were measured to justify colonial hierarchies.
Act II: Measure to understand
(20th century)
Anthropology and biology questioned race as a valid scientific category.
Act III: Measure to connect
(21st century)
Genomics reveals that humanity is a single, interwoven lineage with no biological basis for racial hierarchy.
The two “thousand-sample” projects mark the bookends of this transformation.
VI. Conclusion: From Bones to Base Pairs — A Revolution in Seeing Humanity
Morton’s thousand skulls remind us how science can be used to rationalize inequality when guided by the wrong assumptions. The 1,000 Genomes Project shows how science can illuminate human unity when guided by curiosity, ethics, and rigorous methods.
Between these two moments lies the story of modern science itself:
a journey from classification to connection,
from hierarchy to diversity,
from skulls to genomes.
A thousand is just a number.
What matters is the world we choose to build with it.
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