J. Hiernaux's career in anthropobiology, expresses the changes which occured in the disciplines since the 50s. The substitution of the populationist approach to the former typological study of variation, the question of human races reconsidered in this new scope through the computation of biological distances and by the use of numerical taxonomy, the endeavour of the IBP and its yields in human adaptability, and finally the recent subdisciplinary trends. All this is interwoven with J. Hiernaux's attraction toward sub-Saharan Africa, where he applied most of his conceptual frame-works and from which he drew some of his leading ideas.