Editing Carleton S. Coon (section)

== Racial theories ==
[[File:Dinaric Mountain Gheg, 2 (Carleton Coon, 1929).jpg|thumb|right|Photographs of men from northern Albania taken by Coon in 1929 and published in ''The Mountains of Giants'' (1950). This "descriptive" approach was typical of Coon's work in physical anthropology before World War II.{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|p=30}}]]
Before World War II, Coon's work on [[Race (human categorization)|race]] "fit comfortably into the old physical anthropology",{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|p=30}} describing the racial [[Typology (anthropology)|types]] supposedly present in human populations based on visible physical characteristics. He explicitly rejected any specific definition of race and used the concept to describe both highly specific groupings of people and continent-spanning racial types. In ''The Races of Europe'' (1939), for example, an update of [[William Z. Ripley]]'s 1899 book [[The Races of Europe (Ripley book)|of the same title]], he distinguished between at least four racial types and sub-types of [[Jewish people]], but also maintained that there existed a single, primordial Jewish race, characterised by a [[Jewish nose]] and other physical features that together form "a quality of looking Jewish".{{Sfn|Coon|1939|p=441}} In these early works Coon alluded to essential, "pure" racial types that produced the specific races he observed through [[Hybrid (biology)|hybridization]], but did not attempt to explain how or where these types arose.{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|pp=29–30}}

The immediate post-war period marked a decisive break in Coon's work on race as the conventional, typological approach was challenged by the "new physical anthropology". Led by Coon's former classmate [[Sherwood Washburn]], this was a movement to shift the field away from description and classification and towards an understanding of human variability grounded in the [[Modern synthesis (20th century)|modern synthesis]] of [[biological evolution]] and [[population genetics]]. For some anthropologists, including [[Ashley Montagu]] and later Washburn himself, the new physical anthropology necessitated the wholesale rejection of race as a scientific category. In contrast, in ''Races: A Study in the Problem of Race Formation in Man'' (1950), Coon, together with his former student [[Stanley Garn]] and [[Joseph Birdsell]], attempted to reconcile the race concept with the new physical anthropology's emphasis on genetics and adaptation.{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|p=31}} This was followed by Coon's ''magnum opus'', ''The Origin of Races'' (1962), which put forward a theory of the origins of essential racial types, however distinct from what is described by the model of [[multiregional evolution]] (MRE) as it drastically understates the role played by [[gene flow]] (whereas MRE requires it).{{Sfn|Goodman|Hammonds|2000|p=31}}

Coon concluded that sometimes different [[Race (human classification)|racial]] types annihilated other types, while in other instances 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 also posited 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).{{Sfn|Coon|1939}} Coon suggested that the "maximum survival" of the European racial type was increased by the replacement of the indigenous peoples of the New World.{{Sfn|Coon|1939}} He stated the history of the White race to have involved "racial survivals" of White subraces.{{Sfn|Coon|1939|loc=Chapter 2, Section 12}}

===Racial origins===

Coon first modified [[Franz Weidenreich]]'s polycentric (or multiregional) theory of the origin of races. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in the Old World from [[Homo erectus]] to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. Coon held a similar belief that modern humans, ''Homo sapiens'', arose separately in five different 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", but unlike Weidenreich stressed gene flow far less.<ref>"The Origin of Races: Weidenreich's Opinion", S. L. Washburn, ''American Anthropologist'', New Series, Vol. 66, No. 5 (Oct. 1964) (pp. 1165–1167).</ref><ref>"An Attempted Revival of the Race Concept", Leonard Lieberman, ''American Anthropologist'', New Series, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Sep. 1995), pp. 590–592.</ref> Coon's modified form of the Weidenreich Theory is referred to as the Candelabra Hypothesis (parallel evolution or [[polygenism]]) that minimizes gene flow.<ref name="multiregional">{{cite journal |last1=Wolpoff |first1=M. H. |last2=Hawks |first2=J. D. |author2-link=John D. Hawks |last3=Caspari |first3=R. |date=2000 |title=Multiregional, not multiple origins |journal=[[American Journal of Physical Anthropology]] |volume=112 |issue=1 |pages=129–136 |url= http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wolpoff/Papers/Multiregional.PDF |doi=10.1002/(SICI)1096-8644(200005)112:1<129::AID-AJPA11>3.0.CO;2-K |pmid=10766948 |hdl=2027.42/34270 |hdl-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hawks |first1=J. |author1-link=John D. Hawks |last2=Wolpoff |first2=M. H. |date=2003 |title=Sixty years of modern human origins in the American Anthropological Association |url= https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65197/1/aa.2003.105.1.89.pdf |journal=American Anthropologist |volume=105 |issue=1 |pages=89–100 |doi=10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.89 |hdl=2027.42/65197 |hdl-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Eckhardt |first1=R. B. |last2=Wolpoff |first2=M. H. |last3=Thorne |first3=A. G. |date=1993 |title=Multiregional Evolution |doi=10.1126/science.262.5136.973-b |journal=Science |volume=262 |issue=5136 |page=974 |pmid=8235634}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Caspari |first1=R. |last2=Wolpoff |first2=M. H. |date=1996 |title=Weidenreich, Coon, and multiregional evolution |journal=Human Evolution |volume=11 |issue=3–4 |pages=261–268 |doi=10.1007/bf02436629 |s2cid=84805412}}</ref>

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.<ref>Coon, Carleton S. (1962). ''The Origins of Races''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.</ref>{{Secondary source needed|date=October 2020}}  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 after page 370, in the illustrative serie of number XXXII of The Origin of Races. Coon contrasted a picture of an [[Indigenous Australian]] 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.

{{blockquote|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 principal schools.}}

By this he meant that the Caucasoid and Mongoloid races had evolved more in their separate areas after they had left Africa in a primitive form.{{Secondary source needed|date=October 2020}} He also 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."{{Citation needed|date=November 2021}}

Coon also acknowledged the variation in head and nasal forms in Mongoloid populations and even considered some groups to exhibit 'Caucasoid features', such as [[Ainu people|Ainu]], [[Gilyaks]], [[Atayal people|Atayal]], [[Miao people|Miaos]] etc.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Coon |first=Carleton S. |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.533641/page/n194/mode/1up?q=Japan |title=Living Races Of Man |date=1966 |pages=}}</ref>

===Races in the Indian sub-continent===
Coon's understanding of racial typology and diversity within the Indian sub-continent changed over time. In ''The Races of Europe'', he regarded the so-called "Veddoids" of India ("tribal" Indians, or "Adivasi") as closely related to other peoples in the South-Pacific ("Australoids"), and he also believed that this supposed human lineage (the "Australoids") was an important genetic substratum in Southern India. As for the north of the sub-continent, it was an extension of the Caucasoid range.{{Sfn|Coon|1939}} By the time Coon coauthored ''The Living Races of Man'', he thought that India's [[Adivasis]] were an ancient Caucasoid-Australoid mix who tended to be more Caucasoid than Australoid (with great variability), that the Dravidian peoples of Southern India were simply Caucasoid, and that the north of the sub-continent was also Caucasoid. In short, the Indian sub-continent (North and South) is "the easternmost outpost of the Caucasoid racial region".<ref>''The Living Races of Man'', '''On Greater India''</ref> Underlying all of this was Coon's typological view of human history and biological variation, a way of thinking that is not taken seriously today by most anthropologists/biologists.<ref>{{cite journal|title=Non-Darwinian estimation: My ancestors, my genes' ancestors|first1=Kenneth M.|last1=Weiss|first2=Jeffrey C.|last2=Long|date=May 1, 2009|journal=Genome Research|volume=19|issue=5|pages=703–710|doi=10.1101/gr.076539.108|pmid=19411595|pmc=3647532}}</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/templeton.pdf | title=Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective | access-date=2024-02-08}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/|title=Welcome|website=raceandgenomics.ssrc.org|access-date=April 8, 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.1002/ajpa.20995 | volume=139 | issue=1 | title=Race reconciled?: How biological anthropologists view human variation | year=2009 | journal=American Journal of Physical Anthropology | pages=1–4 | last1 = Edgar | first1 = Heather J.H.| pmid=19226646 }}</ref>