Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for his scientific racist theories concerning the parallel evolution of human races, which were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific by modern science.
The concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
The Caucasian race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
The Nordic race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. It was once considered a race or one of the putative sub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th century anthropologists divided the Caucasian race, claiming that its ancestral homelands were Northwestern and Northern Europe, particularly to populations such as Anglo-Saxons, Germanic peoples, Balts, Baltic Finns, Northern French, and certain Celts, Slavs and Ghegs. The supposed physical traits of the Nordics included light eyes, light skin, tall stature, and dolichocephalic skull; their psychological traits were deemed to be truthfulness, equitability, a competitive spirit, naivete, reservedness, and individualism. In the early 20th century, the belief that the Nordic race constituted the superior branch of the Caucasian race gave rise to the ideology of Nordicism.
The Mediterranean race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on the now-disproven theory of biological race. According to writers of the late 19th to mid-20th centuries it was a sub-race of the Caucasian race. According to various definitions, it was said to be prevalent in the Mediterranean Basin and areas near the Mediterranean and Black Sea, especially in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa, most of West Asia, the Middle East or Near East; western Central Asia, parts of South Asia, and parts of the Horn of Africa. To a lesser extent, certain populations of people in Ireland, western parts of Great Britain, and Southern Germany, despite living far from the Mediterranean, were thought to have some minority Mediterranean elements in their population, such as Bavaria, Wales, and Cornwall.
Capoid race is a grouping formerly used for the Khoikhoi and San peoples in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races. The term was introduced by Carleton S. Coon in 1962 and named for the Cape of Good Hope. Coon proposed that the term "Negroid" should be abandoned, and the sub-Saharan African populations of West African stock should be termed "Congoid" instead.
The Armenoid race was a supposed sub-race in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races which was developed originally by Europeans in support of colonialism. The Armenoid race was variously described as a "sub-race" of the "Aryan race" or the "Caucasian race".
Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was influential to prominent anthropologists, such as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes.
Typology in anthropology was the categorization of the human species by races, based solely on traits that are readily observable from a distance such as head shape, skin color, hair form, body build, and stature. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists used a typological model to divide people from different ethnic regions into races,.
Ethiopid is an outdated racial classification of humans indigenous to Northeast Africa, who were typically classified as part of the Caucasian race – the Hamitic sub-branch, or in rare instances the Negroid race. The racial classification was mainly made up of the Afroasiatic-speaking populations of the Horn of Africa, but to an extent included certain Nilo-Saharan populations of the Nile Valley and the Great Lakes region.
Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a book by Canadian psychologist and author J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario for many years, and the head of the controversial Pioneer Fund. The first unabridged edition of the book came out in 1995, and the third, latest unabridged edition came out in 2000; abridged versions were also distributed.
Sir Herbert Hope Risley was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal identification of the centuries old established caste system of the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used anthropometric data to divide Indians into seven races.
Various attempts have been made, under the British Raj and since, to classify the population of India according to a racial typology. After independence, in pursuance of the government's policy to discourage distinctions between communities based on race, the 1951 Census of India did away with racial classifications. Today, the national Census of independent India does not recognise any racial groups in India.
Mongoloid is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms such as "Mongolian race", "yellow", "Asiatic" and "Oriental" have been used as synonyms.
The Turanid race was a supposed sub-race of the Caucasian race in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races which was developed originally by Europeans in support of colonialism. The Turanid type was traditionally held to be most common among the populations native to Central Asia. The name is taken from the phylum of Turanian languages, which are the combination of the Uralic and Altaic families, hence also referred to as the term Ural–Altaic race.
Negroid is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category.
The peopling of India refers to the migration of Homo sapiens into the Indian subcontinent. Anatomically modern humans settled India in multiple waves of early migrations, over tens of millennia. The first migrants came with the Coastal Migration/Southern Dispersal 65,000 years ago, whereafter complex migrations within South and Southeast Asia took place. West Asian (Iranian) hunter-gatherers migrated to South Asia after the Last Glacial Period but before the onset of farming. Together with ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers they formed the population of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
Oscar Ferdinand Peschel was a German geographer and anthropologist.
The history of anthropometry includes its use as an early tool of anthropology, use for identification, use for the purposes of understanding human physical variation in paleoanthropology and in various attempts to correlate physical with racial and psychological traits. At various points in history, certain anthropometrics have been cited by advocates of discrimination and eugenics often as a part of some social movement or through pseudoscientific claims.
The Indid race is an obsolete racial classification of human beings based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. In anthropological literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, the populations of the Indian subcontinent were classified as belonging to this race, which was categorized as belonging to the Mediterranean type of the greater Caucasoid race.
