Carleton S. Coon

Prof. Dr. Carleton Stevens Coon

Carleton Stevens Coon (b. 23 June 1904 in Wakefield, Massachusetts; d. 3 June 1981 in Gloucester, Massachusetts) was a American physical anthropologist and race realist best remembered for his scientific works on race. He fought a losing battle against the rise of Boasian anthropology and race denialism and is consequently often negatively misrepresented by the victors now dominating American anthropology.

Life

From a young age Coon developed an interest in history, and mastered ancient Greek. He later went to study Arabic at Harvard University, where he began to study Egyptology. Under the influence of Earnest Hooton, Coon first became interested in physical anthropology and took two trips to North Africa from 1924 to conduct fieldwork on the Caucasoid Berbers of the Rif area of Morocco. He was partcularly interested in their unusual high case of blondism. Three years after graduating with a doctorate in anthropology, Coon published his first serious ethnological study, entitled the Tribes of Rif (1931) which was in fact largely his Harvard dissertation of the same name. He also published two fictional books, loosely based on his encounters with the Berbers he studied, the Flesh of the Wild Ox (1932) and The Riffian (1933). In 1935, Coon was appointed an instructor at Harvard and became a professor of anthropology there in 1938. By this time he had also published his second anthropological study Measuring Ethiopia and Flight into Arabia (1935). His first major racial work though was carried out several years later in 1939, culminating in the "updated" version of Ripley's classic text The Races of Europe, which gave Coon renowned status in the anthropological community, for example William W. Howells describes it as a "historic compendium". To this date this study still remains the most detailed on the racial history of Europe.

Coon's anthropological research ceased for a while during the outbreak of the Second World War. He joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and was engaged in espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in North Africa. Returning to America, Carleton Coon adopted the prestige position of Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia, and a professor title. Over the next ten years Coon conducted many excavations at prehistoric sites such as Iraq (1948) and Iran (1951), with archaeologists from the museum. These incursions led Coon to publish The Seven Caves in 1957. However in 1950, he had also published a study on race, Races, in collaboration with Garn and Birdsell. Garn, although a close friend to Coon was a population geneticist who believed races should be defined through their frequency in genes, Coon in contrast disagreed believing typology could be imposed on populationism. Coon's enemies though by this time were the Boasian race denialists, particularly Ashley Montagu. He lated clashed with them, and the more extreme population geneticists, notably Dobzhansky, when he published his magnum opus The Origin of Races (1962) which went through 9 reprints up to 1973.

Coon stepped down as President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in the early 1960's in disgust after the association voted to censure Putnam's book Race and Reason. Yet, Coon returned to the study of race in 1965 with his study and sequel work, The Living Races of Man, written in collaboration with the anthropologist Edward E. Hunt Jr., which examined adaptation. Despite resigning over the censorship of Putnam, Coon actually never officially lost his position. He died in 1981, with his final work Racial Adaptations published a year after (Howells writing the foreword) which expanded from a 1979 article published in a anthropological journal. His autobiography was also published in the same year. Carl Coon is his son.

Racial theories

The Angel (wrestler) and Prof. Coon

Race Origins

"Homo Erectus, perhaps already divided into five geographic races of 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." – Coon, 1962

Influenced by the polycentric hypothesis of the German anthropologist Prof. Dr. med. Franz Weidenreich, Coon argued that Homo sapiens are split into 5 major races that evolved in different regions into sapiens at different thresholds from erectus. Coon was never clear in his work about gene flow, and since he didn't stress it, his theories were considered to be neo-polygenic; despite claiming he accepted "peripheral" gene flow to critics, but elsewhere he tolerated parallel evolution. Coon accepted common ancestry between the races, though not recent, originally arguing races diverged up to 1,000,000 - 750,000 years ago, and was a critic of what became the Out of Africa model. Coon by the late 1970's had changed his view of when the races diverged; in his Racial Adaptations, he discusses the theory that at least two or three races may be traced back further to Australopithecus. William W. Howells wrote the foreword to Racial Adaptations, and generally praises the book for its content on adaptations in races.

Wikipedia bias attempts to portray Coon's book as having had no impact, or favourable reviews. In reality, The Origin of Races (1962) recieved many positive reviews by notable authorities such as Mayr, Simpson, Krogman, Garn and Howells: "...two of the three 'leading evolutionists throughout the world' wrote glowing reviews in prominent forums" (Marks, 2000). Origins was listed as a "Reviewers' Choice" in 1962 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Writing for the Tribune, Wilton M. Krogman wrote that Coon's work "is an important book about our own kind" that has "scientific validity; more, it has human dignity." Hulse criticised Coon's theory on racial origins but applauded the work for its content on fossils: "no better text for a course in Fossil Man has yet been published". Anthropologist Donald A. Swan defended Coon's theory of races in a 1973 article published in the Mankind Quarterly.

Other positive reviewers of Coon's theory on racial origins included Robert Gayre, David C. Rife, Alice M. Brues and Nathaniel Weyl. Julian Huxley also gave a positive review, asserting: "a valuable contribution to the evolutionary biology of man". Coon's hypothesis on race origins differs to mainstream Multiregionalism in the sense it argues sapien races have evolved directly out of "archaic" human forms in different continental areas at different times, while Wolpoff's Multiregionalism model today argues that sapiens evolved together as a single species (rejecting Coon's independent Erectus-sapienization grade transition of the races). Both model's however argue for regional continuity. Multiregionalism however stresses trait continuity, not racial (lineage) like Coon's model.

Coon's five races of man

• Caucasoid race
• Congoid race
• Capoid race
• Mongoloid race
• Australoid race

Anti-egalitarianism

Coon was opposed to politically correct egalitarianism which came to assert all humans are biologically equal. Instead, Coon discussed races in terms of Alpha and Omega, in terms of evolutionary development.

Race and Clines

"Coon described the genetic gradient that resulted from such admixture in the marginal area located between the two geographical extremes of genetic variation as an "interracial cline." The term "interracial" referred to hybrid populations which resulted from an admixture of two genetically different race groups, while an ‘intraracial cline’ referred to the genetic variation which resulted from natural selection operating on colonies subjected to new and different environmental pressures not experienced by their parent group. Racial clines have complicated modern efforts to reconstruct racial history by comparing the gene pools of different populations and calculating the genetic distance between these populations. Clearly, intraracial clines result from speciation, they are produced as a result of an evolutionary process, but interracial clines result from crossbreeding as a result of genetic migration (where invaders or immigrants mix their genes with the former proprietors of a territory)." – Pearson, 2002

The Races of Europe

Coon's book The Races of Europe (1939) concludes the following:

1. The White race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of sapiens and neanderthals) 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.

Works

Science

• Tribes of the Rif. (1931). Harvard African Studies.
• The Races of Europe. (1939). Macmillan.
• Principles in Anthropology. (1942, with E. D. Chapple). New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• A Reader in General Anthropology. (1948). New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man. (1950, with Stanley M. Garn and Joseph B. Birdsell). Charles C Thomas.
• Caravan: the Story of the Middle East. (1951, 2nd ed. 1958, 4th ed. 1976). New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• The Story of Man. (1954, 2nd ed. 1962, printed as The History of Man, 3rd ed. 1969). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• The Seven Caves: Archaeological Explorations in the Middle. (1957). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Caravan: the Story of the Middle East (1958)
• The Origin of Races. (1962, 9th reprint. 1973). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man
• Yengema Cave Report (his work in Sierra Leone)
• Anthropology A to Z. (1963, with Edward E. Hunt Jr., based on the text by Gerhard Heberer).
• The Living Races of Man. (1965, with Edward E. Hunt Jr., 9th reprint. 1974). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Seven Caves: Archaeological Exploration in the Middle East
• Mountains of Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs
• The Hunting Peoples. (1971). Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
• Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon. (1981). Prentice-Hall.
• Racial Adaptations (1982, foreword by William W. Howells). Nelson-Hall.

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)

Papers/Articles

• Coon, C. S. (1935). "People of the Rif". Nat. Hist. 35(2). pp. 92-106.
• Coon, C. S., Taylor, G. (1941). "Races of the world; a discussion of recent classifications". Hum. Biol. 13. pp. 390-97.
• Coon, C. S., Johnson, P. (1946). "Racial contexts of prehistory". Antiquity. 20. pp. 154-57.
• Coon, C. S., Ehrich, R. W. (1947). "Occipital flattening among the Dinarics". Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 6(2). pp. 181-86.
• Coon, C. S. (1949). "The Eridu crania, a preliminary report". Sumer. 5. pp. 103—104.
• Coon, C. S. (1950). "Human races in relation to environment and culture". In: Origin and Evolution of Man. Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol. 5. pp. 247-58.
• Coon, C. S. (1953). "Climate and race". In: Climate Change, ed. H. Shapley, pp. 13—34.
• Coon, C. S., Garn, S. M. (1955). "On the Number of Races of Mankind". American Anthropologist. 57. 5. 1955. pp. 996-1001.
• Coon, C. S. (1955). "Some Problems of Human Variability and Natural Selection in Climate and Culture". The American Naturalist. 89. No. 848. pp. 257-279.
• Coon, C. S. (1957). "What is race?". Atlantic Monthly. 200(4). pp. 103-108.
• Coon, C. S. (1958). "Faces of Asia". Pa. Univ. Mus. Bull. 22. pp. 1-48.
• Coon, C. S. (1959). "Race and Ecology in Man". Cold Spring Harbour Symposia on Quantitative Biology. 24. pp. 153-9.
• Coon, C. S. (1961). "Man against the cold". Nat. Hist. 70(l). pp. 56-69.
• Coon, C. S. (1962). "New findings on the origin of races". Harper's Magazine. 225(1351). pp. 66—68; 71-74.
• Coon, C. S. (1966). "The Taxonomy of Human Variation". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 134(2). pp. 516-523.
• Coon, C. S. (1978). "L'adaptation humaine". La Recherche. 89(9). pp. 438-48.

Other

• "A study of the fundamental racial and cultural characteristics of the Berbers of North Africa as exemplified by the Riffians". (1928). Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
• The Mountains of Giants: A racial and cultural study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs. (1950). Peabody Mus. Pap. 23(3).
• "Populations, Human". In: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15th ed., vol. 14, pp. 839—48. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica.

External links

• Carleton Stevens Coon Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution