Carleton S. Coon

Carleton Stevens Coon, (23 June 1904 – 3 June 1981) was a American physical anthropologist best remembered for his books on race.

An article published in The Journal of the History of Biology examines the controversy surrounding Coon’s 1962 book, The Origin of Races in which Coon maintained that the human species was divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens and that the races evolved into sapiens at different times.

The article concludes:
 * Coon’s thesis was used by segregationists in the United States as proof that African Americans were “junior” to white Americans and hence unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines the interactions among Coon, segregationist 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.

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 went on to study at Harvard, where he began to study Egyptology with George Reisner. However he, like many students, was swayed to the 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 on in Harvard, making the first of many trips to North Africa in 1925 to conduct fieldwork in the Rif area of Morocco, which was still 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. His work from this period included a 1939 rewrite of William Z. Ripley's 1899 The Races of Europe.

Coon was a colorful character who undertook adventuresome exploits and, like his mentor Earnest Hooton, wrote widely for a general audience. He published several novels and fictionalized accounts of his trips to North Africa, including The Riffians, Flesh of the Wild Ox, Measuring Ethiopia, and A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent.

This last book was an account of his work 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, a practice generally condemned by working anthropologists today, in the context of 21st century science ethics. During this time, he worked in the United States Office of Strategic Services.

Coon did physical anthropological studies abroad. He studied Albanians from 1929-1930, he traveled to Ethiopia for research in 1933, and in Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans, he worked on sites from 1925 to 1939 and discovered a Neanderthal on a site in 1939.

In 1948, Coon left Harvard to take up a position as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, which had an excellent museum attached to it. Throughout the 1950s he produced a series of academic papers, as well as many popular books for the general reader, the most notable being The Story of Man (1954). Coon's own interest was in attempting to use Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain the differing physical characteristics of various racial groups.

From 1954-1957, Coon did photography work for the United States Air Force. 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.

Racial theories
Coon hypothesized that different racial types fought for domination and annihilation of other 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. He also stated that the "maximum survival" of Europeans was increased by their replacement of the indigenous peoples of the New World. He asserted the history of the White race to have involved "racial survivals" of the different White subraces.

Others have pointed out that many are interpreting Coon and his theories as just the opposite of what is true. Coon believed that human races evolved in a parallel manner, with various races exchanging genes, rather than one superior race leading to the extinction of another race.

Study of the Caucasoid race
In his book The Races of Europe, The White Race and the New World, he uses the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously. In his introduction he states the concern (of his book), "the somatic character of peoples belonging to the white race". Also, this can be seen in his first chapter, "Introduction to the Historical Study of the White Race" and his ending chapter, "The White Race and the New World".

He considered the European racial type to be a subrace of the Caucasoid race which warranted more study. In other sections of The Races of Europe he mentions people to be "European in racial type" and having a "European racial element" He advised that the study of some major versions of European racial types was sadly lacking compared with other typologies, "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."

Multiregional model and racial hierarchies
Carleton Coon believed Whites followed a separate evolutionary path from other humans. 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." and "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 from Homo erectus in five separate places, "as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state". Discovery of a possible hybrid Homo sapiens X neanderthalensis fossil child at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho rock-shelter site in Portugal in 1999 raised hopes of rehabilitating the Multiregional hypothesis of which Coon was a proponent, but these hopes have been criticized in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Carleton Coon believed some races were less evolved than others. For example, he considered the Lapps of Northern Europe to represent a transitional Mongoloid race, or a mix of the Nordic subrace and the Mongoloids. He hypothesized that if they were indeed a transitional Mongoloid, then they have retained their brachycephalization from a previous stage in evolution but have the blondism of the higher Caucasoid stage of evoluion. He also believed some races reached the Homo Sapiens stage in evolution before others, resulting in the higher degree of civilization among some races. He considered the Mongoloid race and the Caucasoid race to be racially superior to the Australoid, Capoid and Congoid races. One page in Coon's book contrasted a picture of an Australian Aborigine called "Topsy" with a Chinese professor, and was captioned "The Alpha and the Omega"), resembling the scientific racism of the early twentieth century. Wherever Homo arose, and Africa is at present the most likely continent, he soon dispersed, in a very primitive form, throughout the warm regions of the Old World....If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principle schools.

Races in India
Coon said that within the Caucasoid race there is 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 further elaborated that in India there are "Veddoids... individuals who are to all extents and purposes Australoid" Over the exact racial composition of India Coon admitted, "[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
In 1962, he published his magnum opus The Origin of Races. Unfortunately for Coon, physical anthropology had changed greatly since his time as an undergraduate at Harvard. Contemporary researchers such as Sherwood Washburn and Ashley Montagu were heavily influenced by the modern synthesis in biology and population genetics, as well as a Boasian revolt against typological racial thinking. The human species was now seen as a continuous serial progression of populations rather than the five parallel genetically distinct races. The 1960s were a controversial time for racial theories, and Carleton Putnam suggested that Coon's work, among others, justified racial segregation. Coon stepped down as President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in disgust after the association voted to censure Putnam's book Race and Reason: A Yankee view. Coon continued to write and defend his work. He died on June 3, 1981, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Brief overview of The Races of Europe
Coon's book concludes the following:


 * 1) The White race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of sapiens and neandertals) types and Mediterranean (purely sapiens) types.
 * 2) The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
 * 3) Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic period and settled there.
 * 4) The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
 * 5) When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, then occurs the process of dinarization which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features.
 * 6) The White race encompasses the regions of Europe, the Middle East, the South Asia and North Africa.
 * 7) The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock, being a mixture of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans.

Falling into disfavor
Aside from Coon's discontent over the decision of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists to censure "Race and Reason", which caused him to resign, some of his other works were discounted because he wouldn't agree with the evidence brought forward by the works of people such as Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Lieberman and others which played down or even dismissed race as a valid concept with which to partition biodiversity. In his autobiography, Coon says he was offered the chance to write an article about race relations, but he was neither paid nor was the article published because he wrote that races had a natural inclination for separatism.

Works by Carleton S. Coon

 * The Origin of Races (1962)
 * The Story of Man (1954)
 * The Races of Europe (1939)
 * Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man
 * The Hunting Peoples
 * Anthropology A to Z (1963)
 * Living Races of Man (1965)
 * Steven Caves: Archaeological Exploration in the Middle East
 * Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon (1981)
 * Mountains of Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs
 * Yengema Cave Report (his work in Sierra Leone)
 * Caravan: the Story of the Middle East (1958)
 * A North Africa Story (1980)
 * Racial Adaptations (1982)
 * Flesh of the Wild Ox (1932)
 * The Riffian (1933)
 * Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon

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." &mdash;The Story of Man, 1954, page 376

Further reading and sources

 * The Lagar Velho 1 Skeleton


 * 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.


 * In Ways Unacademical: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's "The Origin of Races" 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.