A quick heads up for listeners. This episode contains some swear words and descriptions of violence.

In 2018, Paul Wolf Mitchell was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

He was teaching an intro to anthropology course, and one day a student came up to talk to him at

the end of class.

And he was really, really bright, but he was very shy because he was the youngest person in the in the classroom

He was actually a high school student given permission to take a few courses at Penn

Both of his parents were from Nigeria and he started to ask me why there were all of these

skulls on the wall in this classroom.

All around this particular classroom

were hundreds of human skulls,

yellowed with age and lined in wooden cabinets and rows, the way you might display antique pottery.

Most of them had labels pasted across their actual foreheads.

The student asked me, why is it that there are these skulls that are

labeled as coming from Africa? Paul went on to explain that these hundreds of

skulls were from all over the world, but the ones he was asking about were from people

born in Africa who were taken across the Atlantic to Cuba, where they were enslaved and died.

And then sometime later, their skulls were exhumed and sent to Philadelphia.

To a doctor and scientist named Samuel Morton.

Morton earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and then acted as an advisor to Penn's medical students.

He went on to be known as the father of physical anthropology, but he was also in one of the most literal

uses of the term racist. He believed that

human races are separate species and that they can be ranked with white people like him at the top.

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