The rise and fall of anthropometry

Modern surface anthropometry arose historically from late nineteenth-century anthropology. This anthropology was devoted primarily to skeletal classification and description, and was used largely to characterize racial differences and to describe putative evolutionary pathways. It was bone-based, static, taxonomic – a ‘fossil anthropometry’. Our current anthropometric practices – the logic of landmarking, for example – descend in a direct line from this mindset. Many of the measurement protocols of the International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry (ISAK), for example, are designed to determine bone lengths. The trochanterion landmark is an example: it is virtually impossible to locate the most superior point on the greater trochanter on a living human being, because of the powerful muscle attachments. Yet we persist because this landmark gives our best estimate of femur length. In fact, there is only one measurement in the ISAK protocol that could not be taken on a corpse: arm girth (flexed and tensed). Today we are trying, with a nineteenth-century logic and mindset, to meet the various demands of soft tissue-based, functional and dynamic disciplines. We need to locate axes of rotation for biomechanics, critical soft-tissue dimensions for human factors research, functional anthropometric capabilities for sports performance, fat and muscle mass distributions for health research, fleshy girths and body contour lengths for the apparel industry. In the past, our limitations have been partly technological. Restricted to the linearity of the caliper and the tape, we have been tied to two-dimensional constructions of the body. Lacking methods of threedimensional capture and analysis, we have largely neglected shape elements and tissue topography, beyond gross categorizations such as somatotype or the android/gynoid dichotomy. We have ignored the inside of the body almost entirely, except for bone dimensions. We have lacked techniques for imaging, describing and modelling dynamic anthropometry – the tensing, shifting and rippling of compliant and resilient tissue in dynamic movements, so important, for example, in clothing and furniture design. On a more extended time-scale, we have lacked the morphometric tools to describe body plasticity associated with maturation, ageing and evolution. Above all, we have lacked the communications systems to ensure standardization and to build accessible data repositories. We now have those tools – three-dimensional (3D) whole-body surface scanners, ultrasound, computerized axial tomography and magnetic resonance imaging scans, 3D motion capture systems, sophisticated software for morphometric analysis and, above all, the internet. Although we have them, we are not using them. All too often, an anthropometry conference presentation means yet another report of the sitting height of basketballers, and a journal article a mundane account of the evolution of somatotype in rugby footballers, or body mass index in pre-pubertal Australian children. Descriptive anthropometry is being consigned to ever more marginal journals. Figure 1 shows the rise and fall of anthropometry in two major sports science journals. The top panel shows the relative rate of publication of articles with relevant anthropometric keywords (‘body density’, ‘body size’, etc.) in the Journal of Applied Physiology between 1948 and 1997, and the lower panel the relative rate of publication of articles with the keyword ‘anthropometry’ (or its derivatives) in Medicine and Science in Sports (and Exercise) between 1969 and 1999. Both panels show a decline in interest in anthropometry after the