Chris Stringer on the possibility of a Eurasian origin for Homo heidelbergensis

Who is Homo heidelbergensis?

H. heidelbergensis is a critical human species in the Middle Pleistocene (∼130–780 thousand years ago (ka)). We know from several beautifully preserved crania that this species had a large brain, within the lower range of modern human variation, and a less robust face than early fossil humans. We know from their long bones that they were tall, strong people. From their associated archaeology we know they were capable of producing beautiful tools such as the large handaxes found in huge numbers at Boxgrove in Sussex. But there are many unanswered questions: who exactly belongs to the species Homo heidelbergensis, where did they live, how do they fit into the human family tree, and are they a separate species at all? [. . .]

Are they our ancestors? African H. heidelbergensis material, such as Broken Hill, shares numerous features with European fossils such as Petralona, leading many to group them together. As long as Mauer is also included, this taxon can be named H. heidelbergensis. Proponents of this wide concept of H. heidelbergensis assert that the mosaic of primitive and derived features shared by this group of fossils is unique, with few traits linking them exclusively to either modern humans or Neanderthals ( Figure 1B). H. heidelbergensis is thus hypothesised to be the last common ancestor of both Neanderthals in Eurasia and H. sapiens in Africa. This scenario is probably the most popular and well supported at present. [. . .]

The geographic origin of H. heidelbergensis is still unknown, but the early fossils from Asia suggest that continent is as likely a place of origin as Europe or Africa at the moment. An Asian origin for a species directly ancestral to our own would certainly shake up the current rather Afro-centric view of our evolution.

Related:

• The Denisova hominin need not be an out of Africa story
• Alan Templeton's model of human origins

Gender and Politics Among Anthropologists in the Units of Selection Debate

Gender and Politics Among Anthropologists in the Units of Selection Debate:

In recent years evolutionary theorists have been engaged in a protracted and bitter disagreement concerning how natural selection affects units such as genes, individuals, kin groups, and groups. Central to this debate has been whether selective pressures affecting group success can trump the selective pressures that confer advantage at the individual level. In short, there has been a debate about the utility of group selection, with noted theorist Steven Pinker calling the concept useless for the social sciences. We surveyed 175 evolutionary anthropologists to ascertain where they stood in the debate. We found that most were receptive to group selection, especially in the case of cultural group selection. The survey also revealed that liberals and conservatives, and males and females, all displayed significant differences of opinion concerning which selective forces were important in humanity’s prehistory. We conclude by interpreting these findings in the context of recent research in political psychology.

Peter Turchin:

A particularly interesting recent study is the one by William Yaworsky, Mark Horowitz, and Kenneth Kickham, Gender and Politics among Anthropologists in the Units of Selection Debate, published a month ago in Biological Theory. It’s interesting because it addresses the question of group versus kin selection, which is of course one of the most dividing issues in evolutionary science.

Yaworsky and colleagues obtained 175 surveys from evolutionary anthropologists who served faculty in graduate programs in various universities (which means that they are training their own graduate students). Their analysis of the questionnaires showed that there were very striking differences between different groups of anthropologists. Liberals were much more likely to disagree with the statement that tribal conflict was a principal evolutionary force that shaped human behavior. Conservatives, on the other hand, thought that tribalism was a fundamental human trait. They also tended to agree with the notion that homicide was frequent in early human societies.

The differences between male and female evolutionary anthropologists were even stronger than between different parties. Women were very resistant to the ideas that tribal conflict was an important selective force and that homicide was common in prehistory. [. . .]

And I expect that the questions of the importance of between-group competition and the frequency of lethal violence in prehistory will eventually achieve the same level of consensus. It may take many decades, but my hunch is that it will happen more quickly than that.

In fact, it’s already happening. The data of Yaworsky and colleagues show that 80 percent of respondents disagree with Pinker’s assertion that group selection is a useless concept. A similar proportion thinks that group selection is an important process, and 55 percent consider group selection as a more important process than kin selection. In contrast, among the professors who trained this cohort of respondents, the previous generation, only 8 percent were strongly in favor or “leaned” towards group selection. We are winning!

Related:

• R. A. Fisher on group selection in humans
• Hamilton on inclusive fitness and social behavior in humans
• More from Hamilton on kin recognition and intergroup hostility
• Robert Axelrod on the evolution of ethnocentrism

Reply to Peter Frost (part 5): anthropology as the science of race

In discussing the history of anthropology, Sarich and Miele (in Race: The Reality of Human Differences) find it useful to:

highlight three critical junctures in which science, politics, and personality interacted: the disputes between Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow, between Franz Boas and Madison Grant, and finally between Carleton Coon and Ashley Montagu.

Of the two cases that played out in America, both involve race-denialist Jewish immigrants opposing "northeastern WASPs" with colonial roots (Coon's ancestry is 3/4 colonial New England and 1/4 Cornish; all of Grant's ancestors were in America before 1790, at least half of Grant's ancestry can be traced back to New England).

Darwinism in Britain, whether in the early days or today, has fo­cused on individuals, with groups emerging from them. British evolutionism has always had the shopkeeper’s sober obsession with keeping a good set of books. In Germany, however, Darwin­ ism took on a collectivist, romantic tone. There the great apostle of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1913), imbued the theory of nat­ural selection with the spirit of German Romanticism. [. . .]

Haeckel and all he came to champion were opposed by his former professor, the distinguished biologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). The conflict between them was both personal and political. The two men were polar opposites in appearance, ancestry, and tempera­ ment. Haeckel was tall, blond, German in name and appearance, with a strong love of the out-of-doors, and a generalist looking for one grand theory to account for everything. Virchow, whose name and appearance betrayed a Slavic ancestry, was a detail man and a pedantic laboratory taskmaster. Haeckel was charismatic and devel­oped a huge, almost religious following; Virchow was respected, even feared, but rarely liked. Haeckel was a strong supporter of the German Volk and Reich; Virchow was a radical advocate of social reform who fought at the barricades in the revolution of 1848. Vir­chow was a member of the German Progressive Party and opposed Bismarck’s policies. The Iron Chancellor, having already dispatched or intimidated earlier opponents with saber or pistol, challenged the professor to a duel. Virchow declined— unless they agreed to fight with scalpels. [. . .]

Between 1863 and Virchow’s death in 1902, Haeckel and his former professor clashed at scientific conferences and in print. Haeckel’s evolutionism was progressive, moving from lower to higher forms. Without any physical evidence, Haeckel went out on a limb and predicted fossil hunters would soon discover a crea­ture he dubbed Pithecanthropus, the ape-man or missing link. In­spired by Haeckel’s prediction, one of his disciples, Eugène Dubois, found the fossil he termed Pithecanthropus erectus (now classified as Homo erectus) in Java in 1891. For Virchow this finding entailed pointless speculation. He rejected the fossils, saying they were the result of pathological degeneration. As his repugnance grew at what he saw as the associations and implications of monism, Vir­chow came to reject evolution altogether. Any change in individ­uals or species that could be observed rather than hypothesized, he argued, was evidence of degeneration, not progress. [. . .]

AND THEN ALONG CAME BOAS: GOOD-BYE RACE, HELLO CULTURE!

When Galton died in 1911, eugenics was widely accepted not only in Britain and Germany but in the United States as well. Raymond Pearl, professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University (then a supporter of eugenics but later an opponent), noted that by 1912, “eugenics was catching on to an extraordinary degree with radical and conservative alike.” [. . .]

At the start of the twentieth century, most American anthropologists came from wealthy Brahmin families and were educated at Harvard University. They were solidly in the eugenics camp, agreeing with Galton on both individual and race differences. And then, as one author put it, Along Came Boas. His name is hardly a household word, but it is no exaggeration to say that Franz Boas (1858-1942) remade American anthropology in his own image. Through the works of his students Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Soci­eties), Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture), and Ashley Montagu (innumerable titles, especially the countless editions of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth), Boas would have more effect on American intellectual thought than Darwin did. For generations, hardly anyone graduated from an American college or university with­ out having read at least one of these books. They all drew their inspiration from Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man.

Franz Boas came from a German Jewish home, steeped in the “sentiment of the barricades” of the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe. He originally obtained his doctorate in physics but later turned to geography. After fieldwork with the Greenland Es­ kimos, he took up anthropology— Virchow’s brand, not Haeckel’s. Virchow, in the words of one biographer, “had perhaps the greatest influence on Boas.” [. . .]

Appointed chairman of the department at Columbia University in 1899, Boas transformed anthropology from the leisure study of a few well-to-do WASPs into a highly credentialed discipline that pumped out Ph.D.’s. By 1915 his students had a two-thirds con­ trolling majority on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 1919, Boas could boast that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” came from his former students at Columbia. By 1926 they headed every major department of anthropology in America.

Before Boas, anthropology was the study of race. After Boas, anthropology in America became the study of culture, defined as “personality writ large,” [. . .]

Like his mentor Virchow, Boas was skeptical of evolutionary explanations, genetic or cultural. He even entertained a sympa­ thy for Lamarckism. What turned him into the godfather of cul­tural determinism in America, however, was the growing popular appeal and political power of the eugenics and anti-immigration movements. [. . .]

Franz Boas was a dark-haired Jewish immigrant from a leftist milieu, educated at German universities steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment. Madison Grant, an archetypal Nordic, was a lawyer turned amateur biologist and a pillar of America’s WASP establishment. Grant claimed that his fellow American Nordics were committing racial suicide, allowing themselves to be “el­ bowed out” of their own land by ruthless, self-interested Jewish immigrants, who were behind the campaign to discredit racial re­ search. Yogi Berra’s words would have been apt: “It was déjà vu all over again.” Haeckel’s monism had driven Virchow from skepti­ cism into rejecting biological evolution. Nativist, proeugenic, elitist tracts such as Grant’s drove Boas from skepticism into re­ jecting the evolutionary perspective on culture and even linguis­ tics (which he had earlier advocated).

In his book In Search of Human Nature (1991), which is subti­ tled The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, Degler concluded that Boas’s substitution of cultural for genetic determinism was not the result of

a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial ques­ tion. Instead, his idea derived from an ideological commitment that began in his early life and academic experiences in Europe and continued in America to shape his professional outlook. To as­sert that point is not to say that he fudged or manufactured his evi­dence against the racial interpretation—for there is no sign of that. But, by the same token, there is no doubt that he had a deep inter­est in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological outlook— racism—which he consid­ered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society.

Coon vs. Montagu:

The Boasians were outsiders. Papa Franz and many of his stu­dents were Jews, though “the preponderance of Jewish intellectu­als in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Some, like Boas himself, were immigrants to boot. Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg in the working-class East End district of London, En­gland. He was so leery of anti-Semitism (“If you’re brought up as a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic . . . It’s a good working hypothesis”) that he reinvented himself as Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu from London’s well-to-do West End fi­nancial district, complete with a posh public school accent. When he came to the United States, Montagu played the role of the British headmaster, lecturing American audiences before a re­ceptive media on the foolishness of their prejudices. Later he dropped the hyphen and became simply Ashley Montagu.

Mead and Benedict could point to WASP pedigrees as pure as Madison Grant’s, but Mead was bisexual and Benedict a lesbian. At that time, those sexual orientations were far more stigmatized than they are today. Their sexual preferences are relevant, be­ cause developing a critique of traditional American values was as much a part of the Boasian program in anthropology as was their attack on eugenics and nativism. [. . .]

Whatever their individual origin, the Boasians felt deeply es­tranged from mainstream American society and the male WASP elites they were displacing in anthropology. Gene Weltfish, an­ other student of Boas, epitomized this sense of alienation when she said she felt that her generation had only three choices— go live in Paris, sell The Daily Worker (the U.S. Communist Party newspaper) on street corners, or study anthropology at Columbia. [. . .]

According to Degler, “Boas almost single-handedly developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science.” In fact, Boas achieved his goal only with help, including a great deal from a most unwelcome source— Hitler and the Holocaust. After World War II, “race” and “eugenics” became very dirty words. The University of London’s Department of Eugenics changed its name to the Department of Genetics; the Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute; the Annals of Eugenics was renamed the Annals of Human Genetics; and Eugenics Quarterly became Social Biology. In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organi­ zation (UNESCO) was called upon to adopt “a program of dissemi­ nating scientific facts designed to remove what is generally known as racial prejudice.” For the drafter of the first UNESCO statement, Ashley Montagu, this was an opportunity to deny the reality of race.

ASHLEY MONTAGU VERSUS CARLETON CO O N

The preliminary match in anthropology’s fight over race was Vir­chow versus Haeckel. Then there was Boas versus Madison Grant. The final match in anthropology’s dispute went the distance. It was almost as lengthy as the names of its participants— Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu versus Carleton Stevens Coon.

Again there was a personal element to the clash. Coon was from a New England family that could trace its roots to colonial times and before that to Cornwall, ancestral home of the leg­ endary King Arthur. Coon was quite proud of his ancestry. Those sympathetic to Coon believed his personal dislike of Montagu was because he thought everyone else should dislike him as well. Why the need to pass oneself off as something one is not? Mon­ tagu, as already noted, had his “good working hypothesis” about non-Jews and anti-Semitism. [. . .]

Coon believed that race was a central issue and his job as an anthropologist was to study race; Montagu felt his was to banish race to the periphery and replace it with the concept of “ethnic group.” He began his effort to have the word “race” replaced by “ethnic group” in his 1942 book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. When he was selected to draft the initial (1950) UNESCO Statement on Race, Montagu was given a plat­ form from which to present his view to a much larger, non-acade­mic audience. [. . .]

In his autobiography, Adventures and Discoveries, Coon ex­ plained how younger members wanted a special meeting at the 1961 AAPA convention, supposedly to discuss new business but in fact to censure Putnam’s book. [. . .]

Coon asked for a show of hands on how many attendees present had read the book they were about to censure. Only one. Then he asked how many had even heard about it before the ses­ sion. Only a few. Nonetheless, the resolution condemning Race and Reason passed.

In Coon’s words, “The Communists did not need to fight us. They could rot us from within. I could see it all as in a horrid dream.” (Remember, this was 1961 when both the Cold War and the civil rights movement were at their peaks.) He refused to have his name appear on the resolution as president of AAPA and resigned.

Reply to Peter Frost (part 4): Grant vs. Boas

From Jonathan Spiro's Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant:

Nordic and Anti-Nordic

The lifelong hostility between Madison Grant and Franz Boas was the personification if not the core of the nature-nurture debate in the United States. Grant was the prophet of scientific racism and, in Ellsworth Huntington’s phrase, the perennial “cheer leader of the Nordics in America.” Boas, on the other hand, devoted a lifetime to counteracting “the vicious, pseudo scientific activity of so-called scientists” who belittled nurture and pro- moted “this Nordic nonsense.” [. . .]

But Franz Boas (1858–1942) was the antithesis of Madison Grant. Whereas Grant was the scion of an aristocratic American family and displayed all the attitudes and prejudices implied by such a heritage, Boas was the product of an upper-middle-class German household in which, as he put it, “the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force.” His progressive Jewish parents raised him with a firm belief in the dignity of the individual and the equipotentiality of all humans. As such, during his four-decade reign at Columbia University as the world’s most famous anthropologist, Boas preached with increasing vigor and confidence against racial prejudice, and consciously and actively worked to thwart the dangerous influence of Grant (“that charlatan”) and his disciples. 3 Boas rejected Grant’s division of mankind into biologically distinct and hierarchical subspecies. He challenged not only the superiority but the very existence of the Nordic race. And he denied that there was any correlation between the physical characteristics of a population and its mental or moral traits. The latter, he asserted, were created by the “culture” in which an individual was raised, not his or her germ plasm. Where Grant proclaimed that man was a mammal like any other and that anthropology ought to be a branch of zoology, Boas took the opposite tack and, in the words of Elazar Barkan, “divorced the biological from the cultural study of humankind.” In sum, Boas categorically rejected every tenet of Grant’s scientific racism and actively opposed every facet of Grant’s eugenic program. Of course, it was clear to Grant that the root of Boas’s hostility lay in the fact that he was a Jew, and Grant explained to Maxwell Perkins that Boas “naturally does not take stock in [my version of] anthropology which relegates him and his race to the inferior position that they have occupied throughout recorded history.”

Reply to Peter Frost's most recent bizarre attempt at rewriting history (part 1)

Peter Frost has previously claimed:

Anti-racism was neither solely nor primarily a Jewish invention. It initially arose through a radicalization of the abolitionist movement in the early to mid 19th century, its adherents being overwhelmingly of WASP origin. It then fell into decline, largely in response to the failure of black emancipation and the growing influence of Darwinian thinking in the social sciences. It was this half-discredited antiracism that Jewish immigrants, like Franz Boas, encountered in the late 19th century and the early 20th. With the rise of Nazi Germany, antiracism made a resurgence, and Jewish intellectuals certainly contributed to this resurgence for obvious reasons. But it was at all times as much a northeastern WASP cultural trait as a Jewish one.

He's now back with more of this:

How did [Franz Boas's] views on race evolve over the next twenty years? This evolution is described by Williams (1996), who sees his views beginning to change at the turn of the century. After getting tenure at Columbia University in 1899, he became immersed in the elite liberal culture of the American northeast and began to express his views on race accordingly. [. . .]

From 1900 to 1930, Boas seemed to become increasingly liberal in his views on race, but this trend was hesitant at best and reflected, at least in part, a change in the audience he was addressing. As a professor at Columbia, he was dealing with a regional WASP culture that still preserved the radical abolitionism of the previous century. A good example was Mary White Ovington, whose Unitarian parents had been involved in the anti-slavery movement and who in 1910 helped found the NAACP. Boas was also dealing with the city's growing African American community and, through Ovington's contacts, wrote articles for the NAACP. Finally, he was also dealing with the growing Jewish community, who identified with antiracism partly out of self-interest and partly out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture.

It's an outrageous distortion of history to suggest Jews supported antiracism "out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture".

Most northeasterners, of any class, were never abolitionists (antislavery does not equal abolitionist), and even most abolitionists did not advocate anything approaching modern anti-racism.

No major constituency in America denied the existence of biological differences between blacks and whites when Boas immigrated, and advocating such views provided no quick path to social advancement (though obviously, at a deeper level, Boas was no doubt motivated by a desire to eliminate "anti-semitism").

It would have been very strange indeed for a physical anthropologist in 1890s America to outright deny the existence of race or obvious racial differences. What matters is the direction in which Boas differed from his contemporaries. And there's no question Boas was promoting "anti-racism" from the outset. Frost selectively quotes Boas's 1894 address "Human Faculty as Determined by Race", but even the excerpts chosen by Frost should make clear which direction Boas was pushing. Boas was not disinterestedly speaking race realist truth to an anti-racist American establishment, but lecturing Americans that no differences in civilizational potential had been proven to exist between the races of man, and insisting that any mental differences that existed could not be large, as the opening and conclusion make clear:

Proud of his wonderful achievements, civilized man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him. He has transformed inhospitable forests into fertile fields. The mountain fastnesses are yielding their treasures to his demands. The fierce animals which are obstructing his progress are being exterminated, while others which are useful to him are made to increase a thousand fold. The waves of the ocean carry him from land to land and towering mountain ranges set him no bounds. His genius has moulded inert matter into powerful machines which wait a touch of his hand to serve his manifold demands.

What wonder when he pities a people that has not succeeded in subduing nature; who labor to eke a meagre existence out of the products of the wilderness; who hear with trembling the roar of the wild animals and see the products of their toils destroyed by them; who remain restricted by ocean, river or mountains; who strive to obtain the necessities of life with the help of few and simple instruments.

Such is the contrast that presents itself to the observer. What wonder if civilized man considers himself a being of higher order as compared to primitive man; if it is claimed that the white race represents a higher type than all others.

When we analyze this assumption, it will soon be found that the superiority of the civilization of the white race alone is not a sufficient basis for this inference. As the civilization is higher, we assume that the aptitude for civilization is also higher; and as the aptitude for civilization presumably depends upon the perfection of the mechanism of body and mind, the inference is drawn that the white race represents the highest type of perfection. In this conclusion, which is reached through a comparison of the social status of civilized man and of primitive man, the achievement and the aptitude for an achievement have been confounded. Furthermore, as the white race is the civilized race, every deviation from the white type is considered a characteristic feature of a lower type. That these two errors underlie our judgments of races can be easily shown by the fact that, other conditions being equal, a race is always described as the lower the more fundamentally it differs from the white race. This becomes clearest by the tendency on the part of many anthropologists to look for anatomical peculiarities of primitive man which would characterize him as a being of lower order, and also by the endeavors of recent writers to prove that there exist hardly any anatomical features of the so-called lowest races which would stamp them as lower types of organisms. Both these facts show that the idea dwells in the minds of investigators that we should expect to find in the white race the highest type of man. [. . .]

Although, as I have tried to show, the distribution of faculty among the races of man is far from being known, we can say this much: the average faculty of the white race is found to the same degree in a large proportion of individuals of all other races, and although it is probable that some of these races may not produce as large a proportion of great men as our own race, there is no reason to suppose that they are unable to reach the level of civilization represented by the bulk of our own people.

Interesting-looking AAPA 2013 abstracts

Program here (pdf).

Natural selection acts to maintain diversity between Out of Africa and sub-Saharan African populations in genes related to neurological processes and brain development. JASON A. HODGSON1,5, ALI AL-MEERI2, CONNIE J. MULLIGAN3 and RYAN L. RAAUM4,5. 1Anthropology, New York University, 2Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Sana'a University, Yemen, 3Anthropology, University of Florida, 4Anthropology, Lehman College and The Graduate Center CUNY, 5-, The New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology.

The Yemeni and Mozabite are closely related Out of Africa (OOA) populations from the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa respectively, while the Maasai are a sub-Saharan African (SSA) population. Using genome-wide SNP data (publicly available for the Mozabite and Maasai, and collected here for the Yemeni) we show the Yemeni to have ~7% and the Mozabite to have ~26% recent sub-Saharan admixture, while the Maasai have ~27% Middle Eastern admixture. We use an adaptation of the locus specific branch length method to look for the effects of natural selection on alleles introduced to the three populations through admixture. We specifically look for 1) the adaptive introgression of alleles from SSA into the Yemeni and Mozabite, 2) the adaptive introgression of alleles from OOA into the Maasai, 3) purifying selection of SSA alleles out of the Yemeni and Mozabite, and 4) purifying selection of OOA alleles out of the Maasai. We found correspondence in patterns of adaptive introgression and purifying selection between the populations for 18 genomic loci, all of which contain protein-coding genes. The correspondence in signatures of selection between three independent populations is strong evidence for natural selection, rather than the false positive signals common in genome-wide scans of selection. Strikingly, of the regions where purifying selection is acting to maintain diversity between the Out of Africa and sub-Saharan African populations, eight out of twelve genes with known ontologies are involved in neurological processes or brain development. A binomial test found this enrichment to be significant. This research was partially supported by NSF grant BCS-0518530.

Out of Eurasia

From Chris Stringer's most recent book ("The Origin of Our Species"):

And the evidence from Dmanisi is now being added to this rethink, since the lack of very ancient fossil human evidence from Asia, apart from Dmanisi, is considered by archaeologists like Robin Dennell and Wil Roebroeks to reflect a lack of preservation and discovery, rather than a real absence. Combining the primitiveness of the Dmanisi specimens and tools with a similar view of the Liang Bua finds, it is argued that there was a widespread phase of human evolution in Eurasia about 2 million years ago, which is now only represented by the isolated Dmanisi and "Hobbit" fossils. This alternative scenario has a small-brained and small-bodied pre-erectus species, perhaps comparable to Homo habilis or even a late australopithecine, dispersing from Africa with primitive tools over 2 million years ago, reaching the Far East and, eventually, Flores. In Asia, this ancestral species then gave rise to the Dmanisi people and Homo erectus, while Dmanisi-like people reentered Africa about 1.8 million years ago, and evolved into later populations there -- including, eventually, Homo sapiens. So the orthodoxy of Out of Africa 1 is being challenged because of new evidence, and new interpretations of old evidence.

Unfinished documentary on Jewish intellectual movements

Minority Rule would have been the late Byron Jost's second film, after the illegal-immigration documentary The Line in the Sand. About an hour of footage, consisting mostly of interviews with E. Michael Jones, Kevin MacDonald, Joseph Sobran, and others, has been uploaded to youtube. Subject matter includes Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School (continue reading).

Ethnographic video online

This was emailed to me. I haven't looked at it yet, but some of you might find it useful.

Ethnographic Video Online provides the largest, most comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior – more than 750 hours and 1,000 films at completion. The collection covers every region of the world and features the work of many of the most influential documentary filmmakers of the 20th century, including interviews, previously unreleased raw footage, field notes, study guides, and more. This first release includes 226 videos totaling roughly 152 hours.

Access it now, registration-free, through Friday, March 12th.
URL: http://anth.alexanderstreet.com
username: ethnography
password: sneakpeek

AAPA 2010 abstracts

Abstracts of AAPA poster and podium presentations (p 52-252). American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 141 Issue S50 (April 2010) Supplement: Program of the Seventy-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (link)

Selected abstracts within (continue reading).

Patrician Racist

Here is a PDF version of Jonathan Spiro's 998-page doctoral dissertation, Patrician Racist: The Evolution of Madison Grant (on which Spiro's book, Defending the Master Race, is based).

(photo credit)

More on Tishkoff et al.

Regarding the recently published African genetic structure paper.

(1) The following bit of asininity from Afro-Jew Roy King made it into a news story:

The "landmark study" should erase any vestiges of colonial-era thinking that Africa is one unit, said Roy King, a Stanford University associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

"No longer can we see Africa as just this homogeneous population," said King, who has studied African migration patterns but was not part of the new paper.

Wait, weren't we supposed to be blaming evil colonialist whiteys for creating "racialist" theories which made distinctions among Africans?

The truth, of course, is that the theories and classifications of early European physical anthropologists are remarkably consistent with the latest genetic data.

People like King also have European colonialists to thank for initiating the study and categorization of African languages.

(2) This comment from "argiedude" (posting as "wolcupitol") is worth reading. The "greater genetic diversity" of Africans is well-established, but the number of clusters reported in this study for Africa vs. the rest of the world is not evidence of such -- the number of clusters is somewhat arbitrary and influenced by sample selection.

Boasianism as a cult

Gelya Frank. Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 731-745.

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a lively, if sometimes hushed, in-house discourse about American anthropology's Jewish origins and their meaning. The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations have been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline. Jewish histories foreground the roles and deeds of Jews, actually a vety small minority: less than 3 percent of the world and of this nation's population (Schmelz and Della Pergola 1995). From that vantage, the development of American anthropology appears part of Jewish history. This essay brings together strands of these various discourses on Jews in anthropology for a new generation of American anthropologists, especially ones concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism.

The public silence or omission concerning anthropology's Jews is due mainly to the tone of liberal humanism and cosmopolitianism set by founder Franz Boas (1858-1942), himself a Jewish German immigrant, who in 1896 established the nation's first department of an- thropology at Columbia University. There has also been a whitewashing of Jewish ethnicity, reflecting fears of anti-Semitic reactions that could discredit the disci- pline of anthropology and individual anthropologists, either because Jews were considered dangerous due to their presumed racial differences or because they were associated with radical causes. [. . .]

Leslie White, a critic of Boas and a non-Jew, argued that the Boasians gained dominance by exclusionary practices and provocatively termed the Boasians a "cult" (1966:4). White labels Boas's analysis of race "inflexible," based as it is upon Boas's background as a Jew and belief in the ideals of the Revolution of 1848. Reworking statements by Boas's students into a polemic, White writes:

Boas, who was "of Jewish extraction" (Lowie, 1947, p. 310), had been intensely concerned with anti-Semitism since his formative years" (Kluckhohn and Prufer, 1959, p. 10). He wrote voluminously on racial problems, as did some of his prominent students. As I have argued elsewhere (White, 1947a), however, he never got to the heart of the matter. Much of his argument was based upon anthropometry and anatomy, which were largely irrelevant because race prejudice and conflict do not arise from lack of knowledge of facts of this sort.... Boas had virtually a closed mind, if we may trust Kroeber's [1956] judgment on this point. [1966:1S17]

White further charges that Boas had a closed attitude toward American-born scholars who were not Jewish (such as Clark Wissler and Ralph Linton) and tended to criticize or overlook anthropological work done by people who were not in the circle of educated Germans and "Forty-Eighters" (supporters of the liberal and socialist revolutions of 1848). White continues:

Let us have another look at the Boas School, the small, compact group of scholars that were gathered about the leader. The earliest were principally foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Goldenweiser was born in Kiev; Radin in Lodz; Lowie in Vienna, and Sapir in Pomerania. Kroeber's father was born in Cologne, and his mother was AmeIican-born, of Gelman antecedents. All were fluent in the German language. Like Boas, most were of Jewish ancestry. John Sholtz, writing in Reflex: A Jewtsh Magaztne (Vol. 6, p. 9, 1935) has observed that in the one field of anthropology alone, it is interesting to note the dispro- portionate position held by Jewish scientists in this country. Men like Boaz [sic], Golden weiser [sic], Lowie, Radin are easily the leaders in the field." . . . A school by definition tends to be a closed society or group. Kroeber tells of how George A. Dorsey, an American-born gentile and a Ph.D. from Harvard, tried to gain admittance to the select group but failed. [1966:26]

[White, Leslie A.
1947 Review of Franz Boas, Race and Democratic Society. American Journal of Sociology 52:371-373.
1966 The Social Organization of Ethnological Theory. Monograph in Cultural Anthropology. Rice University Studies, 52(4). Houston: William Marsh Rice University]

Grant vs. Boas

In case you were wondering, Kevin MacDonald did not ghostwrite the following article. Spiro is Jewish and Patterns of Prejudice is an organ of the "Institute for Jewish Policy Research".

Spiro, Jonathan P. "Nordic vs. anti-Nordic: the Galton Society and the American Anthropological Association," Patterns of Prejudice 36:1 (2002): 35-48.

ABSTRACT Spiro discusses the creation of the Galton Society in 1918 by American eugenicist Madison Grant as an alternative to the American Anthropological Association. On a theoretical level, Grant hoped the Galton Society would uphold the primacy of biological determinism against ‘the culture idea’. On a more personal level, the purpose of the Galton Society was to provide a refuge for native Protestants who feared that the American Anthropological Association had fallen into the hands of the Jews. While the Galton Society flourished initially, by the early 1930s Franz Boas and his disciples had established cultural determinism as the reigning paradigm in American social science, and the Galton Society quietly dissolved itself in 1935.

KEYWORDS American Anthropological Association, antisemitism, eugenics, Franz Boas, Galton Society, Madison Grant, nature–nurture debate, scientific racism

The lifelong hostility between eugenicist Madison Grant (1865–1937) and anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) was the personification if not the core of the nature–nurture debate in the United States. Grant was one of the founders of the conservation movement in America, and worked side-byside with Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the twentieth century to preserve the nation’s natural heritage. Among his many accomplishments, Grant preserved the California redwoods, saved the American bison from extinction, founded the Bronx Zoo, helped to create the Glacier and Denali national parks, and worked tirelessly to protect the whales in the ocean, the bald eagles in the sky and the pronghorn antelopes on the prairie. But Grant was also the prophet of scientific racism and—in geographer Ellsworth Huntington’s phrase—the perennial ‘cheerleader of the Nordics in America’.2 Grant first came to the attention of the reading public in 1916, when Scribner’s and Sons published his bestselling opus, The Passing of the Great Race. [. . .] Passionate, erudite and audacious, The Passing of the Great Race was a tour de force that did for scientific racism what The Communist Manifesto did for scientific socialism. Grant’s book was regularly cited in popular and scholarly works, and the success of The Passing of the Great Race—and Grant’s behind-the-scenes machinations—played a major role in convincing Congress to enact the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s. Grant went on to collaborate with Southern white racists to pass antimiscegenation legislation, and he influenced many states to implement coercive sterilization statutes under which thousands of Americans deemed to be unworthy were sterilized in the 1930s. [. . .]

The American Anthropological Association

Among academics, Boas was practically alone in the mid-1910s in his opposition to Grant. [. . .]

For years, however, Boas had been diligently training a cadre of professional anthropologists who shared his revulsion at the theories of Grant, so that by the end of the 1910s Boas was surrounded and supported by a growing group of influential scholars well positioned to use their prestige and expertise to join in the assault upon eugenics. Some of the more important anthropologists who received their Ph.D.s from Boas were A. L. Kroeber (who earned his degree in 1901), Robert Lowie (1908), Edward Sapir (1909), Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), Paul Radin (1911), Leslie Spier (1920), Ruth Benedict (1923), Melville Herskovits (1923), Margaret Mead (1929) and Ashley Montagu (1937). With the exception of Kroeber, Benedict and Mead, all were Jews, many were immigrants and several were both. These students of Boas set about devising the intellectual weapons and amassing the ethnographic data they would need to combat the disciples of Grant. And while on a theoretical level the debate between the Grantians and the Boasians pitted the defenders of heredity and biological determinism against the proponents of environment and the primacy of culture, it was difficult not to notice that it was at heart a confrontation between the ethos of native Protestants and the Zeitgeist of immigrant Jews.

Intellectually, the Grant–Boas split was also a disagreement between adherents of polygenesis, obsessed with the classification of races, and adherents of monogenesis, who were fairly certain that races were socially constructed myths. Ideologically, it was a battle between establishment figures who insisted on loyalty to the nation and pluralistic egalitarians who defended the rights of the minority. And, professionally, it was a conflict between an older generation of physical anthropologists (often gentleman amateurs with no academic affiliation or perhaps an association with a museum) and the newer generation of cultural anthropologists (usually trained professionals with fulltime positions in academia).12

The older amateurs were aristocratic WASPs with the money and leisure time to ponder fossils as an avocation, whereas the younger professionals were often the children of Jewish immigrants who saw higher education as a route to social respectability, and jobs in academia as a means of economic survival. The gap between the two sides was all but insurmountable. When the Grantians looked at the cultural anthropologists, they saw a group of bearded (with the exception of Benedict, Mead and Elsie Clews Parsons), Jewish, socialist aliens who lacked any appreciation of the importance of evolution and the laws of biology. [. . .]

The culturalists were well aware that their work was viewed as trivial and unscientific. And their response—with Boas leading the way—was to professionalize their discipline. They understood that, by transforming anthropology from an amateur hobby into a professional vocation, they would garner not only respect but also the academic positions (and the funding) that would then be distributed on the basis of merit rather than through the antisemitic old-boy network. [. . .] They therefore worked to reconstitute the American Anthropological Association, heretofore comprised to a large extent by wealthy, untrained amateurs, into an organization of professionally qualified scholars. [. . .] such was the prestige of Boas that within a few years he was elected president of the AAA, his former students began attaining seats on its governing council, and, by the 1910s, the American Anthropological Association had evolved into a respected society of academic anthropologists, with the Boasians in the majority. They then moved to take control of the Association’s journal (American Anthropologist), and by 1915 [. . .] biological determinism was banished from the pages of American Anthropologist, and the culture idea was well on its way to becoming the predominant thesis in the profession. A bewildered Grant could only observe that these developments ‘confirm me in the belief that you must have at the head of any anthropological work a member of the North European race, who has no bias in favor of helots or mongrels’. [. . .]

The Galton Society

By the end of the 1910s the situation within professional anthropology was no longer tenable. The Boasians were in the saddle, and something had to be done. On 6 March 1918, Madison Grant met with Charles Benedict Davenport and the two men agreed to create a new, racially oriented anthropological organization to rival the culture-ridden American Anthropological Association. Grant decided to name it the Galton Society, in honour of Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.

[. . .] Grant organized the Galton Society at exactly the same time that he organized the Save-the-Redwoods League, and, in the early years, when John C. Merriam was still a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he and Grant synchronized the meetings of the Galton Society with those of the Save-the-Redwoods League so Merriam would have to make only one trip to New York. In fact, the constitution of the Save-the-Redwoods League was modelled on that of the Galton Society, which in turn was modelled on that of the New York Zoological Society (which ran the Bronx Zoo). And why not? All three associations served a common end: one would save the large mammals of North America, the other would save the largest trees, and the third the most advanced race: the Nordics. [. . .]

And so the Boasian capture of the American Anthropological Association had been countered by the formation of the Galton Society. At a meeting of the Society in 1925, psychologist William McDougall of Harvard University summed up the situation neatly. On one side of the nature–nurture debate were the sentimental sociologists, egalitarian Bolshevists and intellectual Jews, all of whom were ‘biased against racial psychology’ and permitted the emotional appeal of humanitarianism to stand ‘in place of truth’. On the other side were the ‘serious’ students of race, such as Grant, Stoddard and Huntington, who recognized ‘the reality’ of inequality and stood for ‘the importance of preserving racial distinctions in their purity’.26 It was clear to McDougall and his auditors which faction had right—and science—on its side. [. . .]

‘A historical footnote’

By the early 1920s the members of the Galton Society were confident that they had stemmed the environmentalist tide, and that Franz Boas—as Henry Fairfield Osborn put it—had been relegated to ‘a comparatively obscure and uninfluential position’.38 Madison Grant and the eugenicists now turned their attention to the legislative arena, where they led successful campaigns for immigration restriction, sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws.

But, in the meantime, Boas continued to churn out the cohort of Ph.D.s who soon comprised the majority of professional anthropologists in the United States. They rapidly moved into, and took over, all the major anthropology departments in the country, where they in turn trained the succeeding generation of scholars dedicated to the culture idea. As a result, academic anthropologists hostile to the Galton Society soon set editorial policy for the profession’s journals and dominated the membership of its professional organizations.

Beginning in the late 1920s Boas and his disciples published to academic and popular acclaim a body of work—including Boas’s Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), Margaret Mead’s The Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Melville Herskovits’s The American Negro (1928), Robert Lowie’s Are We Civilized? (1929), Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and Otto Klineberg’s Race Differences (1935)—that cumulatively served to validate cultural anthropology as a viable field and to establish cultural determinism as a legitimate alternative to hereditarianism. ‘There is no doubt’, an alarmed Madison Grant told Osborn upon witnessing all this activity, ‘that there is an organized anti-Nordic conspiracy’.39 To which Osborn could only affirm: ‘There is undoubtedly a conspiracy of the radicals against the whole Nordic and racial theory.’40

Grant and Osborn had every reason to worry. The Boasian point of view, limited to a handful of (primarily Jewish) cultural anthropologists at the end of the First World War, soon began to influence not just other anthropologists but other social scientists as well. And, as a result, by the beginning of the 1930s the culture idea was becoming the reigning paradigm in American social science. [. . .]

Grant admitted that ‘the future looks ominous’, but in his book The Alien in Our Midst (1930) he gamely tried to rally the partisans by insisting that they had on their side ‘the increasing force of science, of eugenics, and of an ever-widening acceptance of the fact that heredity and not environment dominates in the evolution and development of man’.43 Anthropologist (and loyal member of the Galton Society) T. Wingate Todd seconded Grant’s words, and bravely predicted in 1932 that the Grantian form of anthropology ‘is going to be more than ever significant in arranging the affairs of the future, and the Galton Society will have a great mission’.44 Grant and Todd, of course, were deluded. The future belonged to the environmentalists. The Galton Society quietly dissolved in 1935, and ‘the anthropological idea of culture’, writes George Stocking,

became in time part of the vernacular of a large portion of the American public. . . . By the middle of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace for educated Americans to refer to human differences in cultural terms, and to say that ‘modern science has shown that all human races are equal’.45

Distant European populations distinct in facial morphology (no shit?)

Polak mentioned this study in a comment at Dienekes. Nothing too surprising here, but it would be nice to see more efforts of this sort. This is an abstract of a poster from the 2007 AAPA conference (pdf):

Variation in facial features among European populations measured from 3D photographs.

D.K. Liberton1, B. McEvoy2, M. Bauchet1, C.A. Hill1, J.T. Richtsmeier1, T. Frudakis3, M.D. Shriver1.
1Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, 2Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, 3DNAPrint Genomics, Inc.

The presence of craniofacial variation among continentally described groups has been documented. However, finer-scale phenotypic variation among populations has been more difficult to determine. The purpose of this study is to use three-dimensional images to evaluate if there are significant patterns of facial difference among European populations. Besides determining the extent of regional population differences in facial morphology, this work serves as a foundation for studies involving European genetic stratification and the detection of genes that determine facial features.

The study consists of 180 adult women, aged 18-35, from four geographically discrete European regions: Warsaw, Poland (N=45); Rome, Italy (N=45); Porto, Portugal (N=45); and Dublin, Ireland (N=45). Threedimensional photographs were acquired from faces using the 3dMDface imaging system. Three-dimensional landmark coordinate data were collected from using the 3dMD Patient software and were analyzed using Euclidean Distance Matrix Analysis. Pairwise comparisons between geographic regions were performed to determine patterns of significant differences in facial morphology among the four European populations.

Our results indicate that differences in female facial morphology are symmetrical and that population differences are localized to specific facial regions. This shows that there are statistically significant differences in facial morphology among European populations which can be mapped using coordinate data generated from three-dimensional photographs. Furthermore, these results suggest that morphological differences in facial features may likely be the result of genetic differentiation among European populations.

Supported by grants: Science Foundation of Ireland, Walton Fellowship

Negro entry in 1911 encyclopedia

So, years ago, some company OCRs the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and puts it online. Hilarity ensues:

The 1911 Encyclopedia, or the LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia, is advertised as "what many consider to be the best encyclopedia ever written. As a research tool, this 1911 encyclopedia edition is unparalleled - even today." But what about the definition for Negro? It reads in part: "A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark tightly curled hair, flat in transverse section,1 of the 'woolly' or the 'frizzly' type; a greater or less tendency to prognathism; eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth." Can an encyclopedia with definitions like these be considered useful at all?
posted by josephtate (40 comments total)

Yes, it's now objectionable to point out negroes have dark skin, nappy hair, and so forth (or so believes the eunuch above). Later (and perhaps not in direct response to the post I've cited), 1911encyclopedia excise their "Negro" entry. For those who may be interested, I reproduce the entry below. It's cleaned up a bit compared to what appeared on 1911encyclopedia.org, but no doubt errors remain. Scans of the actual pages may be viewed here. See also "Negro Race" in a Catholic encyclopedia of the same era.

NEGRO (from Lat. niger, black), in anthropology, the designation of the distinctly dark-skinned, as opposed to the fair, yellow, and brown variations of mankind. In its widest sense it embraces all the dark races, whose original home is the intertropical and sub-tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere, stretching roughly from Senegambia, West Africa, to the Fijian Islands in the Pacific, between the extreme parallels of the Philippines and Tasmania. It is most convenient, however, to refer to the dark-skinned inhabitants of this zone by the collective term of Negroids, and to reserve the word Negro for the tribes which are considered to exhibit in the highest degree the characteristics taken as typical of the variety.

These tribes are found in Africa; their home, being south of the Sahara and north of a not very well-defined line running roughly from the Gulf of Biafra with a south-easterly trend across the equator to the mouth of the Tana. In this tract are found the true negroes; and their nearest relatives, the Bantu-negroids, are found to the south of the last-mentioned line. The relation of the yellowish-brown Bushman and Hottentot peoples of the southern extremity of Africa to the negro is uncertain; they possess certain negroid characters, the tightly curled hair, the broad nose, the tendency towards prognathism; but their color and a number of psychological and cultural differences would seem to show that the relation is not close. Between the two a certain affinity seems to exist, and the Hottentot is probably the product of an early intermixture of the first Hamito-Bantu immigrants with the Bushman aborigines (see AFRICA: Ethnology). The relation of the negroids of Africa to those of Asia (southern India and Malaysia) and Australasia cannot be discussed with profit owing to lack of evidence; still less the theories which have been put forward to account for the wide dispersal from what seems to be a single stock. It will be sufficient to say that the two groups have in common a number of well-defined characteristics of which the following are the chief: A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark tightly curled hair, flat in transverse section,¹ of the "woolly" or the "frizzly" type; a greater or less tendency to prognathism; eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth.

Sharing these characteristics, but distinguished by short stature and brachycephaly, is a group to which the name Negrito (q.v.) has been given; with this exception the tendency among the negroids appears to be towards tall stature and dolichoce-phaly in proportion as they approach the pure negro type. As the most typical representatives of the variety are found in Africa, the Asiatic and Australasian negroids may be dismissed with this introduction. The negro and negroid population of America, the descendants of the slaves imported from West Africa, and in a less degree, from the Mozambique coast, before the abolition of the. slave-trade, are treated separately below.

In Africa three races have intermingled to a certain extent with the negro; the Libyans (Berbers: q.v.) in the Western Sudan-; and the Hamitic races (q.v.) and Arabs (q.v.) in the east. The identity of the people who have amalgamated with the negro to form the Bantu-speaking peoples in the southern portion of the continent is not certain, but as the latter appear to approach the Hamites in those characteristics in which they differ from the true negroes, it seems probable that they are infusec with a proportion of Hamitic blood. The true negroes show greal similarity of physical characteristics; besides those already mentioned they are distinguished by length of arm, especially of fore arm, length of leg, smallness of calf and projection of heel characteristics which frequently fail to appear to the same degree among the Bantu, who are also as a rule less tall, less prognathous, less platyrrhine and less dark. A few tribes in the heart of the negro domain (the Welle district of Belgian Congo) show a endency to round head, shorter stature and fairer complexion; mt there seems reason to suppose that they have received an nfusion of Libyan (or less probably Hamitic) or Negrito blood.

The color of the skin, which is also distinguished by a velvety surface and a characteristic odour, is due not to the presence of any special pigment, but to the greater abundance of the coloring matter in the Malpighian mucous membrane between the inner or true skin and the epidermis or scarf skin.² This coloring matter is not distributed equally over the body, and does not reach its fullest development until some weeks after birth; so that new-born babies are a reddish chocolate or copper color. But excess of pigmentation is not confined to the skin; spots of pigment are often found in some of the internal organs, such as the liver, spleen, &c. Other characteristics appear to be a liypertrophy of the organs of excretion, a more developed venous system, and a less voluminous brain, as compared with the white races.

In certain of the characteristics mentioned above the negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids. The characteristics are length of arm, prognathism, a heavy massive cranium with large zygomatic arches, flat nose depressed at base, &c. But in one important respect, the character of the hair, the white man stands in closer relation to the higher apes than does the Negro.

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: "the negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily suppose that the development of the negro and white proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brainpan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and lateral pressure of the frontal bone.³ This explanation is reasonable and even probable as a contributing cause; but evidence is lacking on the subject and the arrest or even deterioration in mental development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts. At the same time his environment has not been such as would tend to produce in him the restless energy which has led to the progress of the white race; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum. But though the mental inferiority of the negro to the white or yellow races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the negro is largely the creature of his environment,

¹ This point has been fully determined by P. A. Brown (Classification of Mankind by the Hair, &c.), who shows conclusively that unlike true hair and like true wool, the negro hair is flat, issues from the epidermis at a right angle, is spirally twisted or crisped, has no central duct, the coloring matter being disseminated through the cortex and intermediate fibres, while the cortex itself is covered with numerous rough, pointed filaments adhering loosely to the shaft lastly, the negro pile will felt, like wool, whereas true hair cannot be felted.

² It is also noteworthy that the dark color seems to depend neither on geographical position, the isothermals of greatest heat, nor even altogether on racial purity. The extremes of the chromatic scale are found in juxtaposition throughout the whole negro domain, in Senegambia, the Gabun, upper Nile basin, lower Congo, Shari valley, Mozambique. In the last region M de Froberville determined the presence of thirty-one different shades from dusky or yellow-brown to sooty black. Some of the sub-negroid and mixed races, such as many Abyssinians, Galla, Jolof and Mandingo, are quite as black as the darkest full-blood negro. A general similarity in the outward conditions of soil, atmosphere, climate, food charged with an excess of carbon, such as the fruit of the butter-tree, and other undetermined causes have tended to develop a tendency towards dark shades everywhere in the negro domain apart from the bias mainly due to an original stain of black blood. Perhaps the most satisfactory theory explains the excessive development of pigment in the dark-skinned races as a natural protection against the ultra-violet rays in which tropical light is so rich and which are destructive of protoplasm (see C. E. Woodruff, Tropical Light, London, 1905). The expression " jet black " is applied by Schweinfurth to the upper-Nilotic Shilluk, Nuer and Dinka, while the neighboring Bongo and Mittu are described as of a "red-brown" color "like the soil upon which they reside" (Heart of Africa, vol. i. ch. iv.).

3 La Razza Negra nel suo stato selvaggio, &c. (Turin, 1864), p.

and it is not fair to judge of his mental capacity by tests taken directly from the environment of the white man, as for instance tests in mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the white race, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the negro.

On the other hand negroes far surpass white men in acuteness of vision, hearing, sense of direction and topography. A native who has once visited a particular locality will rarely fail to recognize it again. For the rest, the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test. Given suitable training, the negro is capable of becoming a craftsman of considerable skill, particularly in metal work, carpentry and carving. The bronze castings by the cire perdue process, and the cups and horns of ivory elaborately carved, which were produced by the natives of Guinea after their intercourse with the Portuguese of the i6th century, bear ample witness to this. But the rapid decline and practical evanescence of both industries, when that intercourse was interrupted, shows that the native craftsman was raised for the moment above his normal level by direct foreign inspiration, and was unable to sustain the high quality of his work when that inspiration failed.

In speaking of the form or forms of culture found among negro and negroid tribes, the dependence of the native upon his environment must be kept in mind, particularly in Africa, where interchange of customs is continually taking place among neighbors.

Thus the forest regions are distinguished by a particular form of culture which differs from that prevailing in the more open country (see AFRICA: Ethnology). But it may be said generally that the negro is first and foremost an agriculturist.

The negritos are on a lower cultural plane; they are nomadic hunters who do no cultivation whatever. Next in importance to agriculture come hunting and fishing and, locally, cattle-keeping. The last is not strictly typical of negro culture at all; nearly all the tribes by whom it is practised are of mixed origin, and their devotion to cattle seems to vary inversely with the purity of race. The most striking exception to this statement is the Dinka of the upper Nile, the whole of whose existence centres round the cattle pen. Of the other tribes where pastoral habits obtain to a greater or less extent, the Masai have a large percentage of Hamitic blood, the eastern and southern Bantu-speaking negroids are also of mixed descent, &c.

The social conditions are usually primitive, especially among the negroes proper, being based on the village community ruled by a chief. Where the country is open, or where the forest is not so thick as to present any great obstacle to communication, it has often happened that a chief has extended his rule over several villages and has ultimately built up a kingdom administered by sub-chiefs of various grades, and has ven established a court with a regular hierarchy of officials. Benin and Dahomey are instances of this. But the region where this "empire-building" has reached its greatest proportions lies to the south of the forest belt in the territory of the Bantu negroids, where arose the states of Lunda, Cazembe, &c.

The domestic life of the negro is based upon polygyny, and marriage is almost always by purchase. So vital is polygyny to the native social system that the attempts made by missionaries to abolish plurality of wives would, if successful (a contingency unthinkable under present conditions), result in the most serious social disorder. Not only would an enormous section of the population be deprived of all means of support, but the native wife would be infinitely harder worked; agriculture, the task of the women, would be at a standstill; and infanticide would probably assume dangerous proportions.

Descent in the negro world is on the whole more often reckoned through the female, though many tribes with a patriarchal system are found. Traces of totemism are found sporadically but are rare.

Of the highest importance socially are the secret societies, which are found in their highest development among the negroes of the west coast, and in a far less significant form among'Some of the Bantu negroids of the western forest district. In their lighest form these societies transcend the tribal divisions, and the tie which binds the individual to the society takes precedence of all others. But the secret society cannot be called a definitely negro institution, since it is found in the west only.

As an agriculturist the negro is principally a vegetarian, but this form of diet is not the result of direct choice; meat is everywhere regarded as a great delicacy, and no opportunity of obtaining it is ever neglected, with one exception-that the cattle-keeping tribes rarely slaughter for food, because cattle are a form of currency. Fish is also an important article of diet in the neighborhood of large rivers, especially the Nile and Congo. It is worthy of note that the two cultivated plants which form the mainstay of native life, manioc in the west and centre and mealies in the south and east, are neither of African origin.

Cannibalism is found in its simplest form in Africa. In that continent the majority of cannibal tribes eat human flesh because they like it, and not from any magical motive or from lack of other animal food. In fact it is noticeable that the tribes most addicted to this practice inhabit just those districts where game is most plentiful. Among the true negroes it is confined mainly to the Welle and Ubangi districts, though found sporadically (and due to magical motives) on the west coast, and among the Bantu negroids in the south-western part of Belgian Congo and-the Gabun.

With regard to crafts the most important and typical is that of iron smelting and working. No negro tribe has been found of which the culture is typical of the Stone age; or, indeed, which makes any use of stone implements except to crush ore and hammer metal. Even these are rough pieces of stone of convenient size, not shaped in any way by chipping or grinding. Doubtless the richness of the African soil in metal ores rendered the Stone age in Africa a period of very short duration (see AFRICA: Ethnology). A good deal of aptitude is shown in the forging of iron, considering the primitive nature of the tools. Considerable skill in carving is also found in the west and among the Bantu negroids, especially of Belgian Congo south of the Congo. Weaving is practised to a large extent in the west; the true native material being palm-leaf fibre. The cultivation of cotton, which has become important in West Africa, deals with an exotic material and has been subjected to foreign influences. Among the. Bantu of the Kasai district the art of weaving palm-cloth reaches its highest level, and in the east cotton-weaving is again found. Pottery-making is almost universal, though nowhere has it reached a very advanced stage; the wheel is unknown, though an appliance used on the lower Congo displays the principle in very rudimentary form. The production of fire by means of friction was universal, the method known as "twirling" being in vogue, i.e. the rapid rotation between the palms of a piece of hard wood upon a piece of soft wood. Trading is practised either by direct barter or through the medium of rude forms of currency which vary according to locality. Value is reckoned among the tribes with pastoral tendencies in cattle and goats; among the eastern negroes by hoe-and spear-blades and salt blocks; in the west by cowries, brass rods, and bronze armlets (manilas); in Belgian Congo variously by olivella shells, brass rods, salt, goats and fowls, copper ingots and iron spear-blades, &c.

As regards religion, the question of environment is again important; in the western forests where communities are small the negro is a fetishist, though his fetishism is often combined more or less with nature worship. Where communication is easier the nature worship becomes more systematic, and definite supernatural agencies are recognized, presiding over definite spheres of human life.¹ Where feudal kingdoms have been formed, ancestor-worship begins to appear and often assumes paramount

¹ The three volumes by Colonel Ellis mentioned in the bibliography form an excellent study of the development of negro religion.

importance. In fact this form of religion is typical of all the eastern and southern portion of the continent (see AFRICA: Ethnology). With the negro, as with most primitive peoples, it is the malignant powers which receive attention from man, with a view to propitiation or coercion. Beneficent agencies require no attention, since, from their very nature, they must continue to do good. The negro attitude towards the supernatural is based frankly on fear; gratitude plays no part in it. A characteristic feature of the western culture area, among both negro and Bantu negroid tribes, is the belief that any form of death except by violence must be due to evil magic exercised by, or through the agency of, some human individual; to discover the guilty party the poison ordeal is freely used. A similar form of ordeal is found in British Central Africa, to discover magicians, and the wholesale "smelling-out" of "witches," often practised for political reasons, is a well-known feature of the culture of the Zulu-Xosa tribes. Everywhere magic, both sympathetic and imitative, is practised, both by the ordinary individual and by professional magicians, and most medical treatment is based on this, although the magician is usually a herbalist of some skill. Where the rainfall is uncertain, the production of rain by magical means is one of the chief duties of the magician, a duty which becomes paramount in the eastern plains among negroes and Bantu negroids alike. But the negroes and negroids have been considerably influenced by exotic religions, chiefly by Mahommedanism along the whole extent of country bordering the Sahara and in the east. Christianity has made less progress, and the reason is not far to seek. Islam is simple, categorical and easily comprehended; it tends far less to upset the native social system, especially in the matter of polygyny, and at the same time discourages indulgence in strong drink. Moreover the number of native missionaries is considerable. Christianity has none of these advantages, but possesses two great drawbacks as far as the negro is concerned. It is not sufficiently categorical, but leaves too much to the individual, and it discountenances polygyny. The fact that it is divided into sects, more or less competitive among themselves, is another disadvantage which can hardly be overrated. This division has not, it is true, as yet had much influence upon the evangelization of Africa, since the various missions have mostly restricted themselves each to a particular sphere; still, it is a defect in Christianity, as compared with Islam, which will probably make itself felt in Africa as it has in China.

As regards language, the Bantu negroids all speak dialects of one tongue (see BANTU LANGUAGES). Among the negroes the most extraordinary linguistic confusion prevails, half a dozen neighboring villages in a small area often speaking each a separate language. All are of the agglutinating order. No absolutely indigenous form of script exists; though the Hausa tongue has been reduced to writing without European assistance.

AUTHORITIES.--T. Deniker, Races of Man (London, 1900); A. H. Keane, Ethnology (London, 1896); Man Past and Present (London, 1900); A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples (1887); The Ewe-speaking Peoples (1890); The Yoruba-speaking Peoples (1894); B. Ankermann, "Kulturkreise in Afrika," Zeit.f. Eth. (1905), p. 54. See also AFRICA, 3, Ethnology.

(T. A. J.)

Chutzpah

Sympathetic co-tribalist Jonathan Marks recounts the life of race charlatan "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu". I find the letter of introduction hilarious. Carleton Coon also makes an appearance (in the second block quote, discussing the 1950 UNESCO "Statement on Race").

Certainly the most vocal and influential exponent of anti-racist anthropology was the enigmatic Ashley Montagu (Sperlin 2000). Born Israel Ehrenberg in London's East End, he began by studying physical anthropology informally with Sir Arthur Keith, and later studied cultural anthropology formally with Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. At this time, he reinvented himself as Montague Francis Ashley Montagu. In 1931, he emigrated to the United States, writing a letter introducing himself to Hooton at Harvard, in which he cavalierly misrepresented his credentials:

I am twenty-six, educated at Cambridge, Oxford, London, Florence, and Columbia. M.A., Ph.D., etc. fifteen anthropological publications. Recommended very generously by Sir Arthur Keith, who has furnished me a too-glowing testimonial which you may see if you wish. Sir Arthur once told me that I can always say that he will speak for me, so I may as well mention this too, for if you hold him in as great respect as I do, this should be impressive (December 28, 1931, EHP)

In fact Montagu had not matriculated at either Cambridge or Oxford. He would not earn a PhD for several years, and it would be in cultural anthropology, under the supervision of Ruth Benedict. Nevertheless, he got a job teaching anatomy to dental students through Hrdlicka. In 1941, he launched his first attack upon the central concept of physical anthropology -- race -- combining the Boasian approach with the arguments advanced in Britain by the biologist Julian Huxley adn the anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon in their We Europeans (1936). Montagu maintained a cordial correspondence with Hooton, whose sponsorship (or at least benign neglect) would be needed for any advancement in physical anthropology.

Meanwhile, in the wake of revelations of Nazi horrors UNESCO's president, Julian Huxley, sought to have a formal statement issued about race. An international panel of anthropologists was assembled under Arturo Ramos, a Brazilian anthropologist, who died suddenly, leaving Montagu acting as "rapporteur" (Barkan 1996). The resulting UNESCO Statement on Race was issued in 1950, and left the "old guard" biologists and physical anthropologists sputtering about the divide between cultural and physical anthropology. To them, it was evident that the Statement had been drafted principally by cultural anthropologists -- and authored by its rapporteur, Montagu (Stewart 1961). As one of the angered physical anthropologists wrote, the original statement

was drawn up by eight men, one each from seven countries with Ashley Montagu as rapporteur. Only one, save the rapporteur, is a physical anthropologist -- Juan Comas of Mexico. The United States was represented by a Negro sociologist, E. Franklin Frazier; France by Claude Levi-Strauss, a Jewish sociologist, the UK by Morris Ginsberg, profession unstated. Not a single expert on race had anything to do with it. There were no Germans or Austrians.

It was sent to about 90 scientists, including myself. Darlington, Sir R. Fisher, Genna (Italy) and I "are frankly opposed to the statement". (Carleton Coon to Sarah Dees [undated], CP)

[. . .] the conservative backlash against the 1950 statement was powerful, particularly in England. The British journal Man published a long series of critical comments on it; and in response, a second UNESCO Statement on Race was drafted in 1951. Anxious lest the meeting be dominated by "out-and-out racists," which would result in a "pretty sad" statement (Dobzhansky to Montagu, February 24, 1951, AMP), the anti-racist scholars arranged to have the liberal geneticist L.C. Dunn serve as rapporteur. The second statement emphasized the biological aspects of debates about race -- and principally the indeterminacy of many key issues, such as intelligence. Even so, many senior physical anthropologists and biologists took exception to this statement. Their criticisms were solicited and published as The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry, by UNESCO. [. . .]

Montagu had successfully undermined the concept of race, central to physical anthropology, but at enormous professional cost. Untenured at Rutgers, he was a prime target for the McCarthyites. Succumbing to political pressure, Rutgers summarily fired him, and he found all other academic avenues blocked. He was forced to earn his living as a lecturer and writer. [Oy vey iz mir.]

[pp. 245-246]

Marks, J. (2008) Race across the physical-cultural divide in American anthropology. In: A New History of Anthropology, edited by H. Kuklick. New York: Blackwell, pp. 242-258.