Would you like to visit the Easter Islands? Ever since Captain Cook landed there in the early 1800s, these small Pacific islands with their big-eyed, long-eared monoliths have captured the world's imagination. There they are, almost two thousand granite giants, standing silent guard for centuries. Who built them and why? How could a small, non-technological culture move such massive amounts of stone such great distances? Is there any connection to other ancient monuments around the world?

Surprisingly, however, these were not the questions on the minds of the fingerprint experts who landed there over sixty years ago. To them, one of many scientific teams of the era conducting 'superiority' research, the isolated Easter Islands presented a novel opportunity. All the Brahmin castes were having their fingerprints taken, analyzed, catalogued, and compared; as were North American "Negroes," North American Caucasians, Pygmies, and numerous other population sub-groups. Because Europeans had landed on the islands only a few generations before, it was easy to determine who had 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% European genes.

Selective data from these fingerprints were compared to the fingerprints of gorillas, lemurs, and orangutans. The more the statistical factors matched the Simian population, the lower on the evolutionary scale the population in question was thought to be.

Guess what? Easter Islanders with greater amounts of European genes were found superior. Son of a gun. All over the world, scientific teams were getting similar results: 'they' are inferior, 'we' are superior. This study stands as a classic example of how a built-in bias can skew the data of the most scientifically conducted experiments.

The Easter Island studies stand as a classic misuse of fingerprint data. They revealed nothing

Through the telescope of time, the prejudices of the researchers are embarrassingly obvious. Then, the boiling stew of racial and ethnic hatred soon to erupt as World War II was already bubbling over the sides of the cauldron. But, I wonder whether current blind spots will seem just as self serving a generation or two from now. And if so, will our errors be the ones we can already guess at (environmental, political, racial)? Or, is some minor character, quietly waiting for events we can hardly imagine, poised to claim center stage? At that time, who will appear the heroes and heroines, and who the villains?

Important Postscript: Although some anthropological research of this era was biased, these and other studies did accumulate enormous amounts of data that produced more constructive results. For example, using fingerprint comparison, scientists were able to trace the root civilizations that populated the numerous South Pacific Islands. Thor Heyerdahl notwithstanding, most Islanders turn out to have an Asian heritage.

Current research into fingerprints and schizophrenia have also produced data with unexpected results. See the related article at this web site.