https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/tresors/barbeau/mb0588be.html · Public domain

Trained as a physicist, he redirected his career toward anthropology after fieldwork with the Inuit of Baffin Island and with Pacific Northwest peoples convinced him that culture, not biology, explained human difference. As a professor at Columbia for four decades he trained a generation of anthropologists, among them Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston, and used careful studies of skeletal measurement to dismantle the era's scientific racism, showing that supposedly fixed traits like cranial shape changed within a single generation of immigrants.