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The correlation of increasing size with latitude, known as “Bergmann’s rule”, was first articulated in the 1840s, but its potential applicability to humans was not recognized for another century. In this paper, I have tested if human craniometric data collected by 19th-century naturalists supported this “rule”. At least in the northern hemisphere, they did. Bergmann recognized a relationship between size and latitude in the 1840s, but others studying humans did not, possibly because they were preoccupied with applying anatomical data to debates about human intelligence. Links between cranial anatomy and racist dogma have long been debunked and profound similarities across human populations show that ethnic prejudice has no basis in evolutionary biology. Nonetheless, human populations are not homogeneous or less subject to evolutionary processes than other organisms. Some of these processes are evident in the datasets collected by 19th-century naturalists, whatever their socio-political views may have been.

Keywords: Cranial volume; ; phenotypic variation; latitude; Friedrich Tiedemann; Samuel George Morton; Stephen Jay Gould