Estonian Photos - Part 9

 Estonian Photos

Here's another group of photos from the Tartu Ülikooli museum of anthropology in Estonia.

The museum provides no information about the men, other than the photos came from the Institute of Anatomy.  In particular, it does not say who these men are, or when or why the photos were taken.

My assumption has been that these are military recruits and that the photos were taken between World War I and World War II, when Estonia was an independent country, not part of the Russian Empire (before World War I) or the Soviet Union (after World War II up to 1991).

But that's just a guess.  My anonymous correspondent found another clue about the photos in a Wikipedia article on physical anthropology at the University of Tartu.  The Wikipedia article is in Estonian, not English, though you can get Google to translate it.

In the article, it talks about studies that were done to try to determine whether Estonians were racially "Mongolian."  This sounds crazy to us today, but at the end of the 18th century, Friedrich Blumenbach, the founder of physical anthropology, had categorized Finns and Estonians as Mongolian.

The idea is not as bizarre as it appears.  Finnish and the related Estonian language are unlike all the Indo-European languages, but they are related to languages spoken in the Ural Mountains region of Russia.  Some scholars think the ancestral origin of these languages was in Siberia.

At the time, physical anthropology included the now-discredited practice of phrenology (measuring the skull to predict mental traits).  So, Estonian physical anthropologists did studies measuring the shape of the head, in particular the ratio of the width of the skull to its length.

German scientists concluded that people with "long-headed" skulls were more highly developed.  Naturally, Germanic populations were long-headed.  Estonians were considered short-headed.

Could these naked young men be part of a physical anthropology study to measure their skulls, and is that the reason that their hair is cut so short?

The photos can be downloaded from the museum website in small or large format.  Most of these are the small photos.  The large photos are enormous; it takes about two minutes to download a single photo.  I have downloaded only a few of them in large format, including the photo above.  Click on it to see it larger.  The original photo was so large (over 23 MB) that I reduced it to half-size to show it here, and it's still huge.

My opinion is still that these were military recruits, and the reason their hair is cut short is that they were being inducted into the military.  I find it hard to believe that nearly a thousand young men would allow their heads to be shorn and to pose naked just to participate in an anthropological study for some scientists.

However, assuming that these are new recruits being inducted into the Army, it's quite possible that the Army allowed the scientists at the Institute of Anatomy to photograph and measure its recruits.  That would give the scientists a ready supply of subjects, and it would explain why the photos ended up at the Institute of Anatomy (which had the photo collection before it was given to the Museum of Anthropology).