Seeking humanity’s origins, plundering the Indigenous dead: Hermann Klaatsch’s evolutionary science and its colonial legacies

This essay examines the evolving intellectual trajectory of Hermann Klaatsch (1863– 1916), whose anthropological fieldwork in Australia (1904–1907) involved the ruthless theft of Aboriginal ancestral bodily remains. While recent discussion has rightly focused on the ethical implications of his plundering of the dead, my concern here is to situate Klaatsch within the intellectual currents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century evolutionary science. I trace his movement from comparative morphology to a revisionist Darwinian model of branching human development, shaped in dialogue with Otto Schoetensack and grounded in the hypothesis that the Indo-Australian archipelago might be the site of humankind’s origins. Klaatsch’s interpretation of Indigenous Australians as “living fossils” offered what he saw as unique evidence of early humanity, but in doing so he reinforced already perniciously persuasive Eurocentric narratives of cultural primitivity. The essay argues that the enduring legacy of Klaatsch’s work lies not only in the trauma caused by his theft of ancestral remains, but also in the discursive power of the knowledge he produced—knowledge that underwrote settler-colonial ideologies of racial hierarchy, the necessity for Indigenous “protection” from modernity, and the possibility of gradual selective biological “assimilation” of Aboriginal people within settler society. Repatriation of the ancestral remains that Klaatsch collected from scientific institutions is an ethical imperative, but so too is recognition of the long-lasting intellectual and social consequences of the evolutionary ideas and arguments which informed his Australian research.