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Carleton S. Coon
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Carleton Stevens Coon, (23 June 1904 – 3 June 1981) was a American physical anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and lecturer and professor at Harvard. Coon is noted for books on race.
eton Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts. He developed an interest in prehistory, and attended Phillips Academy, Andover where he studied hieroglyphics and became proficient in ancient Greek.
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Carleton Stevens Coon, (23 June 1904 – 3 June 1981) was a American physical anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and lecturer and professor at Harvard. Coon is noted for books on race.
Biography
Carleton Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts. He developed an interest in prehistory, and attended Phillips Academy, Andover where he studied hieroglyphics and became proficient in ancient Greek. Coon transfered to Harvard, where he studied Egyptology with George Reisner. He was attracted to the relatively new field of anthropology by Earnest Hooton and he graduated magna cum laude in 1925. He became the Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia. Coon continued with coursework at Harvard. He conducted fieldwork in the Rif area of Morocco in 1925, which was politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish. He earned his Ph.D. in 1928 and returned to Harvard as a lecturer and later a professor. Coon's interest was in attempting to use Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain the differing physical characteristics of races. Coon studied Albanians from 1929-1930; he traveled to Ethiopia in 1933; and in Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans, he worked on sites from 1925 to 1939, where he discovered a Neanderthal in 1939. Coon rewrote William Z. Ripley's 1899 The Races of Europe in 1939.
Coon wrote widely for a general audience like his mentor Earnest Hooton. Coon published the novels The Riffians, Flesh of the Wild Ox, Measuring Ethiopia, and A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent. The North Africa Story was an account of his work in North Africa during World War II, which involved espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in German-occupied Morocco under the guise of anthropological fieldwork. During that time, Coon was affiliated with the United States Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Coon left Harvard to take up a position as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1948, which had an excellent museum. Throughout the 1950s he produced academic papers, as well as many popular books for the general reader, the most notable being The Story of Man (1954).
Coon did photography work for the United States Air Force from 1954-1957. He photographed areas where US planes might be attacked. This led him to travel throughout Korea, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Taiwan, Nepal, Sikkim, and the Philippines.
Coon published The Origin of Races in 1962, but it was not well received. The field of anthropology was moving rapidly from theories of racial typing to other trends. Coon continued to write and defend his work. He died on June 3, 1981, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Racial theories
Coon concluded that sometimes different racial types annihilated other types while in other cases warfare and/or settlement led to the partial displacement of racial types. He asserted that Europe was the refined product of a long history of racial progression. He stated that historically "different strains in one population have showed differential survival values and often one has reemerged at the expense of others (in Europeans)", in The Races of Europe, The White Race and the New World (1939). He stated the "maximum survival" of the European racial type was increased by the replacement of the indigenous peoples of the New World. He stated the history of the White race to have involved "racial survivals" of White subraces.
Study of the Caucasoid race
In his book The Races of Europe, The White Race and the New World (1939), Coon used the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously, as had become common in the United States (although not elsewhere). This is in contrast to many uses of the term "White race" that exclude Arabs and those from the Indian subcontinent. Typically Coon would include most people from the Middle East and South Asia within the "Caucasoid" and "White" definitions which he used interchangeably. In his introduction, he stated his interest was "the somatic character of peoples belonging to the white race". His first chapter was entitled, "Introduction to the Historical Study of the White Race", and his last chapter, "The White Race and the New World".
He considered the European racial type to be a sub-race of the Caucasoid race, one which warranted more study. In other sections of The Races of Europe, he mentioned people to be "European in racial type" and having a "European racial element." Coon suggested that the study of some major versions of European racial types was sadly lacking compared with other types, writing, "For many years physical anthropologists have found it more amusing to travel to distant lands and to measure small remnants of little known or romantic peoples than to tackle the drudgery of a systematic study of their own compatriots. For that reason the sections in the present book which deal with the Lapps, the Arabs, the Berbers, the Tajiks, and the Ghegs may appear more fully and more lucidly treated than those which deal with the French, the Hungarians, the Czechs, or the English. What is needed more than anything else in this respect is a thoroughgoing study of the inhabitants of the principal and most powerful nations of Europe."
Summary of The Races of Europe
Coon's 1939 book concluded the following:
- The Caucasian race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of sapiens and neandertals) types and Mediterranean (purely sapiens) types.
- The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
- Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic period and settled there.
- The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
- When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, then occurs the process of dinarization which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features.
- The Caucasian race encompasses the regions of Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Northeast Africa.
- The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock, being a mixture of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans.
Mediterranean Race
According to Carleton Coon the "homeland and cradle" of the Mediterranean race is in the Middle East, in the area from Morocco to Afghanistan. Coon argued that smaller Mediterraneans traveled by land from the Mediterranean basin north into Europe in the Mesolithic era. Taller Mediterraneans (Atlanto-Mediterraneans) were Neolithic seafarers who sailed in reed-type boats and colonized the Mediterranean basin from a Near Eastern origin. He argued that they also colonized the British Isles where their descendants may be seen today, characterized by dark brown hair, dark eyes and robust features. He stressed the central role of the Mediterraneans in his works, claiming "The Mediterraneans occupy the center of the stage; their areas of greatest concentration are precisely those where civilization is the oldest. This is to be expected, since it was they who produced it and it, in a sense, that produced them".
Multiregional model
Carleton Coon believed that each of the five races followed a separate evolutionary path for tens of thousands of years. He believed, "The earliest Homo sapiens known, as represented by several examples from Europe and Africa, was an ancestral long-headed white man of short stature and moderately great brain size." Further, he wrote, "The negro group probably evolved parallel to the white strain." (The Races of Europe, Chapter II) Coon hypothesized that modern humans, Homo sapiens, arose five separate times in five separate places from Homo erectus, "as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state".
In 1999 discovery of a possible hybrid Homo sapiens X neanderthalensis fossil child at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho rock-shelter site in Portugal made some anthropologists think there might be evidence for Coon's Multiregional hypothesis. Further review of the findings, however, did not silence those who disagreed. Conclusions were carried in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many scientists still believe based on sound evidence that Homo neanderthalensis did interbreed with Homo sapiens.
In his 1962 book, The Origin of Races, Coon theorized that some races reached the Homo sapiens stage in evolution before others, resulting in the higher degree of civilization among some races. He had continued his theory of five races. He considered both what he called the Mongoloid race and the Caucasoid race had individuals who had adapted to crowding through evolution of the endocrine system, which made them more successful in the modern world of civilization. This can be found on pages 108-109 of The Origin of Races.
In his book Coon contrasted a picture of an Australian Aborigine called "Topsy" with one of a Chinese professor. His caption "The Alpha and the Omega" was used to demonstrate his research that brain size was positively correlated with intelligence.
By this he meant that the Caucasoid and Mongoloid races had evolved more in their separate areas after they had left Africa, especially by admixture with Homo erectus.
Races in India
In his 1962 book, Coon wrote that within the Caucasoid race there was a "third division [Mediterraneans which]... included... southern India," but remarked this group had "facial features of a Veddoid character which in some instances suggest Australoid affinities." He said that in India there were "Veddoids... individuals who are to all extents and purposes Australoid." Regarding the exact racial composition of India, Coon noted, "[T]he racial history of southern Asia has not yet been thoroughly worked out, and it is too early to postulate what these relationships may be...[I] shall leave the problems of Indian physical anthropology in the competent hands of Guha and of Bowles."
Criticism
Contemporary reception
When Coon published his magnum opus The Origin of Races in 1962, the field of physical anthropology had changed markedly, and his book was not well received. Contemporary researchers such as Sherwood Washburn and Ashley Montagu were heavily influenced by the modern synthesis in biology and population genetics. In addition, they were influenced by Franz Boas, who had moved away from typological racial thinking. Rather than supporting Coon's theories, they and other contemporary researchers viewed the human species as a continuous serial progression of populations.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and changing social attitudes challenged racial theories like Coon's that had been used by segregationists to justify discrimination and depriving people of civil rights. In 1961 non-fiction writer Carleton Putnam, who had founded an airline and was not an academic, had published Race and Reason: A Yankee View, a popular theory of racial segregation. In a sign of rejection of such unscientific thinking, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists voted to censure Putnam's book. Carleton S. Coon, President of the association, resigned in protest of this violation of free speech.
Posthumous reputation
In 2001 the Journal of the History of Biology reviewed the controversy around the reception of Coon’s 1962 book, The Origin of Races. In it Coon had theorized that the human species divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens. Further, he suggested that the races evolved into Homo sapiens at different times.
The article abstract concluded:
Segregationists in the United States used Coon’s work as proof that African Americans were “junior” to white Americans, and thus unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines the interactions among Coon, segregationist [and Coon relative] Carleton Putnam, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and anthropologist Sherwood Washburn. The paper concludes that Coon actively aided the segregationist cause in violation of his own standards for scientific objectivity.
Coon's ideas steadily faded from acceptance as new work superseded his own. New types of evidence brought forward in work by scientists such as Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leonard Lieberman and others, de-emphasized and dismissed race as a valid concept with which to classify human biodiversity.
Works
Science:
- The Origin of Races (1962)
- The Story of Man (1954)
- The Races of Europe (1939)
- Caravan: the Story of the Middle East (1958)
- Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man
- The Hunting Peoples
- Anthropology A to Z (1963)
- Living Races of Man (1965)
- Seven Caves: Archaeological Exploration in the Middle East
- Mountains of Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs
- Yengema Cave Report (his work in Sierra Leone)
- Racial Adaptations (1982)
Fiction and Memoir:
- Flesh of the Wild Ox (1932)
- The Riffian (1933)
- A North Africa Story: Story of an Anthropologist as OSS Agent (1980)
- Measuring Ethiopia
- Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon (1981)
Quotes
- "It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village." —The Story of Man, 1954, pg 376.
Citations
Further reading
- Hybrid Humans? Archaeological Institute of America Volume 52 Number 4, July/August 1999 by Spencer P.M. Harrington
- Carleton Steven Coons, 23 June 1904 - 3 June 1981 (obituary). 1989. W.W. Howells in Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, v.58 108-131.
- Two Views of Coon's Origin of Races with Comments by Coon and Replies. 1963. Theodosius Dobzhansky; Ashley Montagu; C. S. Coon in Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 4. (Oct., 1963), pp. 360-367.
- by JOHN P. JACKSON JR.
Journal of the History of Biology 34: 247–285, 2001. Retrieved 17 November 2006.The Races of Europe (1939) by Carleton S. Coon - physical anthropological information on the indigenous peoples of Europe.
External links
- , National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
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