Oh one digression: Indiana Jones’ Nazi rivals aren’t shoehorned in for drama, German academics absolutely dominated ancient culture archaeological research in the early 20th century and they were a major vector by which German culture understood history as a series of rises and falls of peoples, nations, and empires

Also, most of the “calipers” phrenology-type stuff was basically downstream of efforts to extract as much historical understanding as possible from human remains before DNA testing or carbon dating