Comas was born in the small town of Alayor, Spain, located in the center of the Menorca Island in the Mediterranean Sea, 150 miles southeast of Barcelona.
Four years later, Comas received one of the highest degrees for instructors in the Escuela Superior del Magisterio de Madrid (Rex, 1980).
With his academic achievements, Juan Comas taught throughout Spain, before receiving several pedagogical degrees from prestigious universities in the country.
Pittard was a Swiss anthropologist who had performed numerous investigations and published work in topics covering the evolution and origin of humans, as well as the races of people.
In an act of great affection to his mentor, Juan Comas translated Pittard's book, The Races and History, close to thirty years after being published.
In 1899 Pittard received his Doctoral of Sciences, by presenting his dissertation titled "Recherche d’anatomie comparative sur diverses séries de crânes anciens de la vallée du Rhône (Valais)" (Comparative Anatomical Research on a diverse series of ancient crania in the Rhone Valley).
From his birth up until he left Spain, the country experienced several social and political changes that shaped Juan Comas one way or another.
The anarchist movement that began in the latter half of the 19th century saw Spain's workers perform massive strikes against the institutional monarchy, whose power was decreasing after the defeat in the Spanish–American and Cuban wars of 1898 (Vincent, 2007).
These social events, occurring early in the 20th century in Spain up until the end of World War I, allowed Comas to found his later beliefs, demonstrating the manner in which individual race and ethnicity were constructed in face of large-social structures such as nations.
He was known for his compassion and the way in which he fought for social justice, criticizing the government and attempting to ameliorate injustices by declaring equality among all human beings and debunking institutionalized prejudices and racism.
With it he was able to bring back to Spain different styles that were current in Europe, and which helped him be placed in the position of director of elementary teaching.
One of Comas’ harshest critiques to the Franco Regime was the way in which the state abused the discipline of anthropology to espouse state-sponsored propaganda.
Such new outlooks into scientific research allowed a sea change in the discipline that moved away from the old racial classifications that had been established in the 19th century (Spencer, 1986).
In 1938, a couple of years before arriving in Mexico, the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (or ENAH, National School of Anthropology and History) opened.
One example of Comas' work in Mexico is in regards to Amerindians and how racial ideology attempted to make this population—from Canada to Argentina—not only homogeneous, but as well as primitive in regards to other populations around the world.
In his work commissioned by UNESCO, Racial Myths, Comas (1953) brings to light the history of race and how past societies attempted to define humans who looked different as inferior.
He declared that democracies, a political belief that contrasted the totalitarian regime in Spain, showed the truths of how truly equal all people were.
To highlight a final example of Comas' activist persona, and how he believed activism should be used alongside anthropology, is his work with indigenous populations throughout Latin America.
Comas (1961) argued that anthropologists have a moral obligation to show the truth in institutionalized prejudices that many native groups lived under.
In this book, Comas makes the argument that Christianity is in fundamentally unprejudiced and does not define people inferior due to their physical characteristics (Kleg 1993).
This pursuit of understanding the history of the discipline allowed Comas to create works that were available to the majority of the public (Medina Hernández, 1980).
Between 1943 and 1955, Comas was director or editor of several journals and publications, which maintained high academic prestige and workmanship (Medina Hernández, 1980).
He believed that scientific research and measurements should be done in the most of objective ways, and he was vocal against studies that misused anthropometric techniques and created prejudiced view in the reconstruction of racial histories.
One could use the measurements one found to determine any differences in other people as an inferior character, and thus, be able to promote any racist agenda that the scientist held.
This book was one of the first in the Spanish-speaking world to demonstrate the history of the discipline—one of Comas focus in life—as well as present an argument for evolution in Darwin's sense.
It is important not to down-play the significance of Comas' contributions to social justice and the attempts to demonstrate work that was inherently biased.
His personal belief on indigenismo and anti-racist stands, defined him as an ardent scientific who wanted to demonstrate all research correctly.
Juan Comas's summary history of the American association of physical anthropologists (1928–1968), is a massive work that Alfonso and Little say is indispensable to the historian of the discipline.
Once in Mexico, Comas devoted his work to the pursuit of bettering the lives of others, especially the vulnerable, indigenous populations that were not being supported by the country.
He was an exiled Spanish Republican, editor of numerous journals, historian of the discipline, ex-communist, anti-racist, and indigenista (Gomez Izquierdo, 2000).