Origins Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a scholar at the then modern
Göttingen University developed a concept dividing mankind into five races in the revised 1795 edition of his
De generis humani varietate nativa (
On the Natural Variety of Mankind). Although Blumenbach's concept later gave rise to
scientific racism, his arguments were basically anti-racist, since he underlined that mankind as a whole forms one single
species, and points out that the transition from one race to another is so gradual that the distinctions between the races presented by him are "very arbitrary". Blumenbach counts the inhabitants of North Africa among the "Caucasian race", grouping the other Africans as "Ethiopian race". In this context, he names the "
Abyssinians" and "
Moors" as peoples through which the "Ethiopian race" gradually "flows together" with the "Caucasian race".
In the context of scientific racism Before Darwin The development of Western race theories took place in a historical situation where most Western nations were still profiting from the enslavement of Africans In this context, many of the works published on Egypt after Napoleon's expedition "seemed to have had as their main purpose an attempt to prove in some way that the Egyptians were not Negroes", Discussions on race among Western scholars during the 19th century took place against the background of the debate between
monogenists and
polygenists, the former arguing for a single origin of all mankind, the latter holding that each human race had a specific origin. Monogenists based their arguments either on a literal interpretation of the
biblical story of
Adam and Eve or on secular research. Since polygenism stressed the perceived differences, it was popular among
white supremacists, especially
slaveholders in the US. Through
craniometry conducted on thousands of human skulls, Morton argued that the differences between the races were too broad to have stemmed from a single common ancestor, but were instead consistent with separate racial origins. In
Crania Aegyptiaca, he reported his measurements of internal skull capacity grouped according to Blumenbach's five races, finding that the average capacity of the "Caucasian race" was at the top, and that "Ethiopian" skulls had the smallest capacity, with the other "races" ranging in between. He concluded that the "Ethiopian race" was inferior in terms of intelligence. Upon his death in 1851, when slavery still existed in the southern United States, the influential
Charleston Medical Journal praised him with the words: "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race." While a controversy about the correctness of Morton's measurements has been going on since the late 1970s, modern scientists agree that the volume of the skull and intelligence are not related.
In the age of evolutionary biology Darwin's landmark work
On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, eight years after Morton's death, significantly changed scientific discourse on the origin of humans. British biologist
Thomas Huxley, a strong advocate of Darwinism and a monogenist, counted ten "modifications of mankind", dividing the native populations of
sub-Saharan Africa into the "Bushmen" of the Cape region and the "Negroes" of the central areas of the continent. By the end of the 19th century, the influential German
encyclopaedia,
Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, divided humanity into three major races called
Caucasoid,
Mongoloid, and
Negroid, each comprising various sub-races. While the "
Hamites" of northern Africa were seen as
Caucasoid, "
Australians", "
Melanesians", and "
Negritoes" were seen as
Negroid sub-races, although living outside the African continent. The only sub-races attributed to Africa were the "African Negroes" and the "
Hottentots". The justification for
racist Jim Crow laws was provided by
pseudo-scientific opinions on "negro" psychology like those expressed by the entry for "Negro" in the
Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1910–1911):
Franz Boas and The Race Question Since the 1920s,
Franz Boas and his school of anthropology at
Columbia University were criticising the concept of race as politically dangerous and scientifically useless because of its vague definition. among the causes of
World War II and proposing to replace the term "race" with "ethnic groups" because "serious errors... are habitually committed when the term "race" is used in popular parlance."
Origin of Races in 1962. Coon divided the species
Homo sapiens into five groups: Besides the
Caucasoid,
Mongoloid, and
Australoid races, he posited two races among the indigenous populations of sub-Saharan Africa: the
Capoid race (named for the
Cape of Good Hope) in the south, and the
Congoid race. In 1982, he used
Negroid and
Congoid as synonyms. Coon's thesis was that
Homo erectus had already been divided into five different races or subspecies. "
Homo Erectus then evolved into
Homo Sapiens not once but five times, as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more
sapient state." He thought the
Caucasoid race had passed the threshold to
Homo sapiens about 200,000 years earlier than the
Negroid race, Monatagu (1963) argued that Coon's theory on the speciation of Congoids and other
Homo sapiens was unlikely because the transmutation of one species to another was a markedly gradual process. Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerging
genetics to classify humans, the debate over
Origin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted". and republished in 1989. == Physical features ==