Earnest Albert Hooton (November 20, 1887 – May 3, 1954) was an American physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape.

"[2] Earnest Albert Hooton was born in Clemansville, Wisconsin, the third child and only son of an English-born Methodist minister married to a Canadian-born woman of Scotch-Irish ancestry.

After earning his BA there in 1907, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, which he deferred in order to continue his studies in the United States.

He pursued graduate studies in classics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he received an MA in 1908 and a Ph.D. in 1911 on "The Pre-Hellenistic Stage of the Evolution of the Literary Art at Rome", and then continued on to England.

[3] During the 1930s, between the two World Wars, his data collections helped U.S. Army make better-fitting military equipment, such as uniforms, tank helmets, gas masks, and aircraft seats,[4] long before Le Gros Clark coined ergonomics for civilian (commercial) use.

In 1926, the American Association of Physical Anthropology and the National Research Council organized a Committee on the Negro, which focused on the anatomy of blacks.

"[12] While advocating eugenic sterilizations of those deemed "insane, diseased, and criminalistic", he emphasized there was no justification to correlate such "degeneracy", as he termed it, with race.

Anthropologist Pat Shipman presents Hooton's work as representing a transition in anthropology away from its 19th-century stereotypes about race and its fixation over cranial measurements.

In that context, she writes, Hooton maintained an "oversimplistic mode of thinking about human types and variability" while at the same time he moved to eliminate unfounded racial biases and pseudoscience.

Hooton wrote these measures as follows: The families of the men already married should remain in Germany for a period of years, but might eventually be permitted to join the fathers.

That such differences exist I have not the slightest doubt; that with our present methods they can be summarized quantitatively so that we are justified in assigning one race a position of superiority as contrasted with another, I deny.