A branch of anthropology that is concerned with the characteristics of ancient environments and with their relationships to immunologic and hematologic function. The anthropological uses of the serological discoveries began as an effort to find a more scientific definition of race based on differing distribution of blood types. By 1940 and after several hundred studies that tested over a million subjects, researchers failed in achieving this goal. The data produced, how ever, were largely the basis for the development of human population genetics in the late 1930s and 1940s which redefined humans into gene pools instead of races.