ANTHROPOLOGY

By
A. L. KROEBER

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

PREFACE

In the preparation of Chapters [II], [III], and [VI] of this book I have drawn on a University of California syllabus, “Three Essays on the Antiquity and Races of Man”; for Chapter [VII], on an article “Heredity, Environment, and Civilization” in the American Museum Journal for 1918; and Chapter [V] makes use of some passages of “The Languages of the American Indians” from the Popular Science Monthly of 1911. In each case there has been revision and for the most part rewriting.

Whatever quality of lucidity the volume may have is due to several thousand young men and women with whom I have been associated during many years at the University of California. Without their unwitting but real co-authorship the book might never have been written, or would certainly have been written less simply.

A. L. K.

Berkeley, California, January 22, 1923.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ANTHROPOLOGY

CHAPTER I
SCOPE AND CHARACTER OF ANTHROPOLOGY

[1.] Anthropology, biology, history.—[2.] Organic and social elements.—[3.] Physical anthropology.—[4.] Cultural anthropology.—[5.] Evolutionary processes and evolutionistic fancies.—[6.] Age of anthropological science.

1. Anthropology, Biology, History

Anthropology is the science of man. This broad and literal definition takes on more meaning when it is expanded to “the science of man and his works.” Even then it may seem heterogeneous and too inclusive. The products of the human mind are something different from the body. And these products, as well as the human body, are the subjects of firmly established sciences, which would seem to leave little room for anthropology except as a less organized duplication. Ordinary political history, economics, literary criticism, and the history of art all deal with the works and doings of man; biology and medicine study his body. It is evident that these various branches of learning cannot be relegated to the position of mere subdivisions of anthropology and this be exalted to the rank of a sort of holding corporation for them. There must be some definite and workable relation.

One way in which this relation can be pictured follows to some extent the course of anthropology as it grew into self-consciousness and recognition. Biology, medicine, history, economies were all tilling their fields of knowledge in the nineteenth century, some with long occupancy, when anthropology shyly entered the scene and began to cultivate a corner here and a patch there. It examined some of the most special and non-utilitarian aspects of the human body: the shape of the head, the complexion, the texture of the hair, the differences between one variety of man and another, points of negligible import in medicine and of quite narrow interest as against the broad principles which biology was trying to found and fortify as the science of all life. So too the historical sciences had preëmpted the most convenient and fruitful subjects within reach. Anthropology modestly turned its attention to nations without records, to histories without notable events, to institutions strange in flavor and inventions hanging in their infancy, to languages that had never been written.

Yet obviously the heterogeneous leavings of several sciences will never weld into an organized and useful body of knowledge. The dilettante, the collector of oddities who loves incoherence, may be content to observe to-day the flare of the negro’s nostrils, to-morrow the intricacy of prefixes that bind his words into sentences, the day after, his attempts to destroy a foe by driving nails into a wooden idol. A science becomes such only when it learns to discover relations and a meaning in facts. If anthropology were to remain content with an interest in the Mongolian eye, the dwarfishness of the Negrito, the former home of the Polynesian race, taboos against speaking to one’s mother-in-law, rituals to make rain, and other such exotic and superseded superstitions, it would earn no more dignity than an antiquarian’s attic. As a co-laborer on the edifice of fuller understanding, anthropology must find more of a task than filling with rubble the temporarily vacant spaces in the masonry that the sciences are rearing.

The other manner in which the subject of anthropology can be conceived is that this is neither so vast as to include everything human, nor is it the unappropriated odds and ends of other sciences, but rather some particular aspect of human phenomena. If such an aspect exists, anthropology vindicates its unity and attains to integrity of aim.

2. Organic and Social Elements

To the question why a Louisiana negro is black and thick lipped, the answer is ready. He was born so. As dogs produce pups, and lions cubs, so negro springs from negro and Caucasian from Caucasian. We call the force at work, heredity. The same negro is lazy by repute, easy going at his labor. Is this too an innate quality? Off-hand, most of us would reply: Yes. He sings at his corn-hoeing more frequently than the white man across the fence. Is this also because of his heredity? “Of course: he is made so,” might be a common answer; “Probably: why not?” a more cautious one. But now our negro is singing Suwanee River, which his great-grandfather in Africa assuredly did not sing. As regards the specific song, heredity is obviously no longer the cause. Our negro may have learned it from an uncle, perhaps from his schoolmates; he can have acquired it from human beings not his ancestors, acquired it as part of his customs, like being a member of the Baptist church and wearing overalls, and the thousand other things that come to him from without instead of from within. At these points heredity is displaced by tradition, nature by nurture, to use a familiar jingle. The efficient forces now are quite different from those that made his skin black and his lips thick. They are causes of another order.

The particular song of the negro and his complexion represent the clear-cut extremes of the matter. Between them lie the sloth and the inclination to melody. Obviously these traits may also be the result of human example, of social environment, of contemporary tradition. There are those that so believe, as well as those who see in them only the effects of inborn biological impulse. Perhaps these intermediate dubious traits are the results of a blending of nature and nurture, the strength of each factor varying according to each trait or individual examined. Clearly, at any rate, there is room here for debate and evidence. A genuine problem exists. This problem cannot be solved by the historical sciences alone because they do not concern themselves with heredity. Nor can it be solved by biology which deals with heredity and allied factors but does not go on to operate with the non-biological principle of tradition.

Here, then, is a specific task and place in the sun for anthropology: the interpretation of those phenomena into which both organic and social causes enter. The untangling and determination and reconciling of these two sets of forces are anthropology’s own. They constitute, whatever else it may undertake, the focus of its attention and an ultimate goal. No other science has grappled with this set of problems as its primary end. Nor has anthropology as yet much of a solution to offer. It may be said to have cleared the ground of brush, rather than begun the felling of its tree. But, in the terminology of science, it has at least defined its problem.

To deal with this interplay of what is natural and nurtural, organic and social, anthropology must know something of the organic, as such, and of the social, as such. It must be able to recognize them with surety before it endeavors to analyze and resynthesize them. It must therefore effect close contact with the organic and the social sciences respectively, with “biology” and “history,” and derive all possible aid from their contributions to knowledge. Up to the present time, a large part of the work of anthropology has consisted in acquiring the fruits of the activity of these sister sciences and applying them for its own ends; or, where the needed biological and historical data were not available, securing them.

3. Physical Anthropology

The organic sciences underlie the social ones. They are more directly “natural.” Anthropology has therefore found valuable general principles in biology: laws of heredity, the doctrines of cell development and evolution, for instance, based on facts from the whole range of life. Its business has been to ascertain how far these principles apply to man, what forms they take in his particular case. This has meant a concentration of attention, the devising of special methods of inquiry. Many biological problems, including most physiological and hereditary ones, can be most profitably attacked in the laboratory, or at least under experimental conditions. This method, however, is but rarely open as regards human beings, who must ordinarily be observed as they are. The phenomena concerning man have to be taken as they come and laboriously sifted and re-sifted afterward, instead of being artificially simplified in advance, as by the experimental method. Then, too, since anthropology was operating within the narrow limits of one species, it was driven to concern itself with minute traits, such as the zoölogist is rarely troubled with: the proportions of the length and breadth of the skull—the famous cephalic index—for instance; the number of degrees the arm bones are twisted, and the like. Also, as these data had to be used in the gross, unmodifiable by artificially varied conditions, it has been necessary to secure them from all possible varieties of men, different races, sexes, ages, and their nearest brute analogues. The result is that biological or physical anthropology—“Somatology” it is sometimes called in Anglo-Saxon countries, and simply “anthropology” in continental Europe—has in part constituted a sort of specialization or sharpening of general biology, and has become absorbed to a considerable degree in certain particular phenomena and methods of studying them about which general biologists, physiologists, palæontologists, and students of medicine are usually but vaguely informed.

4. Cultural Anthropology

The historical or social sciences overlie the organic ones. Men’s bodies and natural equipment are back of their deeds and accomplishments as transmitted by tradition, primary to their culture or civilization. The relation of anthropology to historical science has therefore been in a sense the opposite of its relation to biological science. Instead of specializing, anthropology has been occupied with trying to generalize the findings of history. Historians cannot experiment. They deal with the concrete, with the unique; for in a degree every historical event has something unparalleled about it. They may paint with a broad sweep, but they do not lay down exact laws.

Moreover, history inevitably begins with an interest in the present and in ourselves. In proportion as it reaches back in time and to wholly foreign peoples, its interest tends to flag and its materials become scant and unreliable. It is commonly considered useful for a man to know that Napoleon was a Corsican and was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, but a rather pedantic piece of knowledge that Shi Hwang-ti was born in northwestern China and unified the rule of China in 221 B.C. From a theoretical or general point of view, however, one of these facts is presumably as important as the other, for if we wish to know the principles that go into the shaping of human social life or civilization, China counts for as much as France, and the ancient past for as much as the nearby present. In fact, the foreign and the old are likely to be inquired into with even more assiduity by the theoretically minded, since they may furnish wholly new clues to insight, whereas the subjects of conventional history have been so familiarized as to hold out less hope of novel conclusions still to be extricated from them.

Here, then, is the cause of the seeming preoccupation of social or cultural anthropology with ancient and savage and exotic and extinct peoples: the desire to understand better all civilizations, irrespective of time and place, in the abstract or in form of generalized principle if possible. It is not that cave men are more illuminating than Romans, or flint knives more interesting than fine porcelains or the art of printing, that has led anthropology to bear so heavily on the former, but the fact that it wanted to know about cave men and flint knives as well as about Romans and printing presses. It would be irrational to prefer the former to the latter, and anthropology has never accepted the adjudication sometimes tacitly rendered that its proper field is the primitive, as such. As well might zoölogy confine its interest to eggs or protozoans. It is probably true that many researches into early and savage history have sprung from an emotional predilection for the forgotten or neglected, the obscure and strange, the unwonted and mysterious. But such occasional personal æsthetic trends can not delimit the range of a science or determine its aims and methods. Innumerable historians have been inveterate gossips. One does not therefore insist that the only proper subject of history is backstairs intimacies.

This, then, is the reason for the special development of those subdivisions of anthropology known as Archæology, “the science of what is old” in the career of humanity, especially as revealed by excavations of the sites of prehistoric occupation; and Ethnology, “the science of peoples,” irrespective of their degree of advancement.[1]

5. Evolutionary Processes and Evolutionistic Fancies

In their more elementary aspects the two strands of the organic and the social, or the hereditary and environmental, as they are generally called with reference to individuals, run through all human life and are distinguishable as mechanisms, as well as in their results. Thus a comparison of the acquisition of the power of flight respectively by birds in their organic development out of the ancestral reptile stem some millions of years ago, and by men as a result of cultural progress in the field of invention during the past generation, reveals at once the profound differences of process that inhere in the ambiguous concept of “evolution.” The bird gave up a pair of walking limbs to acquire wings. He added a new faculty by transforming part of an old one. The sum total of his parts or organs was not greater than before. The change was transmitted only to the blood descendants of the altered individuals. The reptile line went on as it had been before, or if it altered, did so for causes unconnected with the evolution of the birds. The aeroplane, on the contrary, gave men a new faculty without impairing any of those they had previously possessed. It led to no visible bodily changes, nor alterations of mental capacity. The invention has been transmitted to individuals and groups not derived by descent from the inventors; in fact, has already influenced their careers. Theoretically, it is transmissible to ancestors if they happen to be still living. In sum, it represents an accretion to the stock of existing culture rather than a transformation.

Once the broad implications of the distinction which this example illustrates have been grasped, many common errors are guarded against. The program of eugenics, for instance, loses much of its force. There is certainly much to be said in favor of intelligence and discrimination in mating, as in everything else. There is need for the acquisition of exacter knowledge on human heredity. But, in the main, the claims sometimes made that eugenics is necessary to preserve civilization from dissolution, or to maintain the flourishing of this or that nationality, rest on the fallacy of recognizing only organic causes as operative, when social as well as organic ones are active—when indeed the social factors may be much the more powerful ones. So, in what are miscalled race problems, the average thought of the day still reasons largely from social effects to organic causes and perhaps vice versa. Anthropology is by no means yet in a position to state just where the boundary between the contributing organic and social causes of such phenomena lies. But it does hold to their fundamental distinctness and to the importance of this distinctness, if true understanding is the aim. Without sure grasp of this principle, many of the arguments and conclusions in the present volume will lose their significance.

Accordingly, the designation of anthropology as “the child of Darwin” is most misleading. Darwin’s essential achievement was that he imagined, and substantiated by much indirect evidence, a mechanism through which organic evolution appeared to be taking place. The whole history of man however being much more than an organic matter, a pure Darwinian anthropology would be largely misapplied biology. One might almost as justly speak of a Copernican or Newtonian anthropology.

What has greatly influenced anthropology, mainly to its damage, has been not Darwinism, but the vague idea of evolution, to the organic aspect of which Darwin gave such substance that the whole group of evolutionistic ideas has luxuriated rankly ever since. It became common practice in social anthropology to “explain” any part of human civilization by arranging its several forms in an evolutionary sequence from lowest to highest and allowing each successive stage to flow spontaneously from the preceding—in other words, without specific cause. At bottom this logical procedure was astonishingly naïve. We of our land and day stood at the summit of the ascent, in these schemes. Whatever seemed most different from our customs was therefore reckoned as earliest, and other phenomena disposed wherever they would best contribute to the straight evenness of the climb upward. The relative occurrence of phenomena in time and space was disregarded in favor of their logical fitting into a plan. It was argued that since we hold to definitely monogamous marriage, the beginnings of human sexual union probably lay in indiscriminate promiscuity. Since we accord precedence to descent from the father, and generally know him, early society must have reckoned descent from the mother and no one knew his father. We abhor incest; therefore the most primitive men normally married their sisters. These are fair samples of the conclusions or assumptions of the classic evolutionistic school of anthropology, whose roster was graced by some of the most illustrious names in the science. Needless to say, these men tempered the basic crudity of their opinions by wide knowledge, acuity or charm of presentation, and frequent insight and sound sense in concrete particulars. In their day, a generation or two ago, under the spell of the concept of evolution in its first flush, such methods of reasoning were almost inevitable. To-day they are long threadbare, descended to material for newspaper science or idle speculation, and evidence of a tendency toward the easy smugness of feeling oneself superior to all the past. These ways of thought are mentioned here only as an example of the beclouding that results from baldly transferring biologically legitimate concepts into the realm of history, or viewing this as unfolding according to a simple plan of progress.

6. Age of Anthropological Science

The foregoing exposition will make clear why anthropology is generally regarded as one of the newer sciences—why its chairs are few, its places in curricula of education scattered. As an organized science, with a program and a method of its own, it is necessarily recent because it could not arise until the biological and social sciences had both attained enough organized development to come into serious contact.

On the other hand, as an unmethodical body of knowledge, as an interest, anthropology is plainly one of the oldest of the sisterhood of sciences. How could it well be otherwise than that men were at least as much interested in each other as in the stars and mountains and plants and animals? Every savage is a bit of an ethnologist about neighboring tribes and knows a legend of the origin of mankind. Herodotus, the “father of history,” devoted half of his nine books to pure ethnology, and Lucretius, a few centuries later, tried to solve by philosophical deduction and poetical imagination many of the same problems that modern anthropology is more cautiously attacking with the methods of science. In neither chemistry nor geology nor biology was so serious an interest developed as in anthropology, until nearly two thousand years after these ancients.

In the pages that follow, the central anthropological problems that concern the relations of the organic and cultural factors in man will be defined and solutions offered to the degree that they seem to have been validly determined. On each side of this goal, however, stretches an array of more or less authenticated formulations, of which some of the more important will be reviewed. On the side of the organic, consideration will tend largely to matters of fact; in the sphere of culture, processes can here and there be illustrated; in accord with the fact that anthropology rests upon biological and underlies purely historical science.

CHAPTER II
FOSSIL MAN

[7.] The “Missing Link.”—[8.] Family tree of the Primates.—[9.] Geological and glacial time.—[10.] Place of man’s origin and development.—[11.] Pithecanthropus.—[12.] Heidelberg man.—[13.] The Piltdown form.—[14.] Neandertal man.—[15.] Rhodesian man.—[16.] The Cro-Magnon race.—[17.] The Brünn race.—[18.] The Grimaldi race: Neolithic races.—[19.] The metric expression of human evolution.

7. The “Missing Link”

No modern zoölogist has the least doubt as to the general fact of organic evolution. Consequently anthropologists take as their starting point the belief in the derivation of man from some other animal form. There is also no question as to where in a general way man’s ancestry is to be sought. He is a mammal closely allied to the other mammals, and therefore has sprung from some mammalian type. His origin can be specified even more accurately. The mammals fall into a number of fairly distinct groups, such as the Carnivores or flesh-eating animals, the Ungulates or hoofed animals, the Rodents or gnawing animals, the Cetaceans or whales, and several others. The highest of these mammalian groups, as usually reckoned, is the Primate or “first” order of the animal kingdom. This Primate group includes the various monkeys and apes and man. The ancestors of the human race are therefore to be sought somewhere in the order of Primates, past or present.

The popular but inaccurate expression of this scientific conviction is that “man is descended from the monkeys,” but that a link has been lost in the chain of descent: the famous “missing link.” In a loose way this statement reflects modern scientific opinion; but it certainly is partly erroneous. Probably not a single authority maintains to-day that man is descended from any species of monkey now living. What students during the past sixty years have more and more come to be convinced of, was already foreshadowed by Darwin: namely that man and the apes are both descended from a common ancestor. This common ancestor may be described as a primitive Primate, who differed in a good many details both from the monkeys and from man, and who has probably long since become extinct.

Fig. 1. Erroneous (left) and more valid (right) representation of the descent of man.

The situation may be clarified by two diagrams ([Fig. 1]). The first diagram represents the inaccurate view which puts the monkey at the bottom of the line of descent, man at the top, and the missing link in the middle of the straight line. The illogicality of believing that our origin occurred in this manner is apparent as soon as one reflects that according to this scheme the monkey at the beginning and man at the end of the line still survive, whereas the “missing link,” which is supposed to have connected them, has become extinct.

Clearly the relation must be different. Whatever the missing link may have been, the mere fact that he is not now alive on earth means that we must construct our diagram so that it will indicate his past existence as compared with the survival of man and the apes. This means that the missing link must be put lower in the figure than man and the apes, and our illustration therefore takes on the form shown in the right half of [figure 1], which may be described as Y-shaped. The stem of the Y denotes the pre-ancestral forms leading back into other mammalian groups and through them—if carried far enough down—to the amphibians and invertebrates. The missing link comes at the fork of the Y. He represents the last point at which man and the monkeys were still one, and beyond which they separated and became different. It is just because the missing link represented the last common form that he was the link between man and the monkeys. From him onwards, the monkeys followed their own course, as indicated by the left-hand branch of the Y, and man went his separate way along the right-hand branch.

8. Family Tree of the Primates

While this second diagram illustrates the most essential elements in modern belief as to man’s origin, it does not of course pretend to give the details. To make the diagram at all precise, the left fork of the Y, which here stands for the monkeys as a group—in other words, represents all the living Primates other than man—would have to be denoted by a number of branching and subdividing lines. Each of the main branches would represent one of the four or five subdivisions or “families” of the Primates, such as the Anthropoid or manlike apes, and the Cebidæ or South American monkeys. The finer branches would stand for the several genera and species in each of these families. For instance, the Anthropoid line would split into four, standing respectively for the Gibbon, Orang-utan, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla.

The fork of the Y representing man would not branch and rebranch so intricately as the fork representing the monkeys. Many zoölogists regard all the living varieties of man as constituting a single species, while even those who are inclined to recognize several species limit the number of these species to three or four. Then too the known extinct varieties of man are comparatively few. There is some doubt whether these human fossil types are to be reckoned as direct ancestors of modern man, and therefore as mere points in the main human line of our diagram; or whether they are to be considered as having been ancient collateral relatives who split off from the main line of human development. In the latter event, their designation in the diagram would have to be by shorter lines branching out of the human fork of the Y.

Fig. 2. The descent of man, elaborated over [Figure 1]. For further ramifications, see Figures [3], [4], [9].

This subject quickly becomes a technical problem requiring rather refined evidence to answer. In general, prevailing opinion looks upon the later fossil ancestors of man as probably direct or true ancestors, but tends to regard the earlier of these extinct forms as more likely to have been collateral ones. This verdict applies with particular force to the earliest of all, the very one which comes nearest to fulfilling the popular idea of the missing link: the so-called Pithecanthropus erectus. If the Pithecanthropus were truly the missing link, he would have to be put at the exact crotch of the Y. Since he is recognized, however, as a form more or less ancestral to man, and somewhat less ancestral to the apes, he should probably be placed a short distance up on the human stem of the Y, or close alongside it. On the other hand, inasmuch as most palæontologists and comparative anatomists believe that Pithecanthropus was not directly ancestral to us, in the sense that no living men have Pithecanthropus blood flowing in their veins, he would therefore be an ancient collateral relative of humanity—a sort of great-great-granduncle—and would be best represented by a short stub coming out of the human line a little above its beginning ([Fig. 2]).

Even this figure is not complete, since it is possible that some of the fossil types which succeeded Pithecanthropus in point of time, such as the Heidelberg and Piltdown men, were also collateral rather than direct ancestors. Some place even the later Neandertal man in the collateral class. It is only when the last of the fossil types, the Cro-Magnon race, is reached, that opinion becomes comparatively unanimous that this is a form directly ancestral to us. For accuracy, therefore, [figure 2] might be revised by the addition of other short lines to represent the several earlier fossil types: these would successively spring from the main human line at higher and higher levels.

In order not to complicate unnecessarily the fundamental facts of the case—especially since many data are still interpreted somewhat variously—no attempt will be made here to construct such a complete diagram as authoritative. Instead, there are added reproductions of the family tree of man and the apes as the lineages have been worked out independently by two authorities (Figs. [3], [4]). It is clear that these two family trees are in substantial accord as regards their main conclusions, but that they show some variability in details. This condition reflects the present state of knowledge. All experts are in accord as to certain basic principles; but it is impossible to find two authors who agree exactly in their understanding of the less important data.

9. Geological and Glacial Time

A remark should be made here as to the age of these ancestral forms. The record of life on earth, as known from the fossils in stratified rocks, is divided into four great periods. The earliest, the Primary or Palæozoic, comprises about two-thirds of the total lapse of geologic time. During the Palæozoic all the principal divisions of invertebrate animals came into existence, but of the vertebrates only the fishes. In the Secondary or Mesozoic period, evolution progressed to the point where reptiles were the highest and dominant type, and the first feeble bird and mammal forms appeared. The Mesozoic embraces most of the remaining third or so of the duration of life on the earth, leaving only something like five million years for the last two periods combined, as against thirty, fifty, ninety, or four hundred million years that the Palæozoic and Mesozoic are variously estimated to have lasted.

Fig. 3. The descent of man in detail, according to Gregory (somewhat simplified). Extinct forms: 1, Parapithecus; 2, Propliopithecus; 3, Palæosimia; 4, Sivapithecus; 5, Dryopithecus; 6, Palæopithecus; 7, Pliopithecus; P, Pithecanthropus erectus; H, Homo Heidelbergensis; N, Homo Neandertalensis.

Fig. 4. The descent of man in detail, according to Keith (somewhat simplified). Extinct forms: 2, 5, 6, 7 as in [Figure 3]; Pith(ecanthropus), Pilt(down), Neand(ertal). Living forms: Gb, Or, Ch, Go, the anthropoid apes as in [Figure 3].

These last five million years or so of the earth’s history are divided unequally between the Tertiary or Age of Mammals, and the Quaternary or Age of Man. About four million years are usually assigned to the Tertiary with its subdivisions, the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene. The Quaternary was formerly reckoned by geologists to have lasted only about a hundred thousand years. Later this estimate was raised to four or five hundred thousand, and at present the prevailing opinion tends to put it at about a million years. There are to be recognized, then, a four million year Age of Mammals before man, or even any definitely pre-human form, had appeared; and a final period of about a million years during which man gradually assumed his present bodily and mental type. In this Quaternary period fall all the forms which are treated in the following pages.

The Quaternary is usually subdivided into two periods, the Pleistocene and the Recent. The Recent is very short, perhaps not more than ten thousand years. It represents, geologically speaking, the mere instant which has elapsed since the final disappearance of the great glaciers. It is but little longer than historic time; and throughout the Recent there are encountered only modern forms of man. Back of it, the much longer Pleistocene is often described as the Ice Age or Glacial Epoch; and both in Europe and North America careful research has succeeded in demonstrating four successive periods of increase of the ice. In Europe these are generally known as the Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm glaciations. The probable American equivalents are the Nebraskan, Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsin periods of ice spread. Between each of these four came a warmer period when the ice melted and its sheets receded. These are the “interglacial periods” and are designated as the first, second, and third. These glacial and interglacial periods are of importance because they offer a natural chronology or time scale for the Pleistocene, and usually provide the best means of dating the fossil human types that have been or may hereafter be discovered ([Fig. 5]).

10. Place of Man’s Origin and Development

Before we proceed to the fossil finds themselves, we must note that the greater part of the surface of the earth has been very imperfectly explored. Africa, Asia, and Australia may quite conceivably contain untold scientific treasures which have not yet been excavated. One cannot assert that they are lying in the soil or rocks of these continents; but one also cannot affirm that they are not there. North and South America have been somewhat more carefully examined, at least in certain of their areas, but with such regularly negative results that the prevailing opinion now is that these two continents—possibly through being shut off by oceans or ice masses from the eastern hemisphere—were not inhabited by man during the Pleistocene. The origin of the human species cannot then be sought in the western hemisphere. This substantially leaves Europe as the one continent in which excavations have been carried on with prospects of success; and it is in the more thoroughly explored western half of Europe that all but two of the unquestioned discoveries of ancient man have been made. One of these exceptional finds is from Africa. The other happens to be the one that dates earliest of all—the same Pithecanthropus already mentioned as being the closest known approach to the “missing link.” Pithecanthropus was found in Java.

Now it might conceivably prove true that man originated in Europe and that this is the reason that the discoveries of his most ancient remains have to date been so largely confined to that continent. On the other hand, it does seem much more reasonable to believe that this smallest of the continents, with its temperate or cold climate, and its poverty of ancient and modern species of monkeys, is likely not to have been the true home, or at any rate not the only home, of the human family. The safest statement of the case would be that it is not known in what part of the earth man originated; that next to nothing is known of the history of his development on most of the continents; and that that portion of his history which chiefly is known is the fragment which happened to take place in Europe.

Fig. 5. Antiquity of man. This diagram is drawn to scale, proportionate to the number of years estimated to have elapsed, as far down as 100,000. Beyond, the scale is one-half, to bring the diagram within the limits of the page.

11. Pithecanthropus

Pithecanthropus erectus, the “erect ape-man,” was determined from the top part of a skull, a thigh bone, and two molar teeth found in 1891 under fifty feet of strata by Dubois, a Dutch surgeon, near Trinil, in the East Indian island of Java. The skull and the thigh lay some distance apart but at the same level and probably are from the same individual. The period of the stratum is generally considered early Pleistocene, possibly approximately contemporary with the first or Günz glaciation of Europe—nearly a million years ago, by the time scale here followed. Java was then a part of the mainland of Asia.

The skull is low, with narrow receding forehead and heavy ridges of bone above the eye sockets—“supraorbital ridges.” The capacity is estimated at 850 or 900 cubic centimeters—half as much again as that of a large gorilla, but nearly one-half less than the average for modern man. The skull is dolichocephalic—long for its breadth—like the skulls of all early fossil men; whereas the anthropoid apes are more broad-headed. The jaws are believed to have projected almost like a snout; but as they remain undiscovered, this part of the reconstruction is conjectural. The thigh bone is remarkably straight, indicating habitual upright posture; its length suggests that the total body stature was about 5 feet 7 inches, or as much as the height of most Europeans.

Pithecanthropus was a terrestrial and not an arboreal form. He seems to have been slightly more similar to modern man than to any ape, and is the most primitive manlike type yet discovered. But he is very different from both man and the apes, as his name indicates: Pithecanthropus is a distinct genus, not included in Homo, or man.

12. Heidelberg Man

Knowledge of Heidelberg man rests on a single piece of bone—a lower jaw found in 1907 by Schoetensack at a depth of nearly eighty feet in the Mauer sands not far from Heidelberg, Germany. Like the Pithecanthropus remains, the Heidelberg specimen lay in association with fossils of extinct mammals, a fact which makes possible its dating. It probably belongs to the second interglacial period, so that its antiquity is only about half as great as that of Pithecanthropus ([Fig. 5]).

The jaw is larger and heavier than any modern human jaw. The ramus, or upright part toward the socket, is enormously broad, as in the anthropoid apes. The chin is completely lacking; but this area does not recede so much as in the apes. Heidelberg man’s mouth region must have projected considerably more than that of modern man, but much less than that of a gorilla or a chimpanzee. The contour of the jaw as seen from above is human (oval), not simian (narrow and oblong).

The teeth, although large, are essentially human. They are set close together, with their tops flush, as in man; the canines lack the tusk-like character which they retain in the apes.

Since the skull and the limb bones of this form are wholly unknown, it is somewhat difficult to picture the type as it appeared in life. But the jaw being as manlike as it is apelike, and the teeth distinctly human, the Heidelberg type is to be regarded as very much nearer to modern man than to the ape, or as farther along the line of evolutionary development than Pithecanthropus; as might be expected from its greater recency. This relationship is expressed by the name, Homo Heidelbergensis, which recognizes the type as belonging to the genus man.

13. The Piltdown Form

This form is reconstructed from several fragments of a female brain case, some small portions of the face, nearly half the lower jaw, and a number of teeth, found in 1911-13 by Dawson and Woodward in a gravel layer at Piltdown in Sussex, England. Great importance has been ascribed to this skull, but too many of its features remain uncertain to render it safe to build large conclusions upon the discovery. The age cannot be fixed with positiveness; the deposit is only a few feet below the surface, and in the open; the associated fossils have been washed or rolled into the layer; some of them are certainly much older than the skull, belonging to animals characteristic of the Pliocene, that is, the Tertiary. If the age of the skull was the third interglacial period, as on the whole seems most likely, its antiquity might be less than a fourth that of Pithecanthropus and half that of Heidelberg man.

The skull capacity has been variously estimated at 1,170, nearly 1,300, and nearly 1,500 c.c.; the pieces do not join, so that no certain proof can be given for any figure. Except for unusual thickness of the bone, the skull is not particularly primitive. The jaw and the teeth, on the other hand, are scarcely distinguishable from those of a chimpanzee. They are certainly far less human than the Heidelberg jaw and teeth, which are presumably earlier. This human skull and simian jaw are an almost incompatible combination. More than one expert has got over the difficulty by assuming that the skull of a contemporary human being and the jaw of a chimpanzee happened to be deposited in the same gravel.

In view of these doubts and discrepancies, the claim that the Piltdown form belongs to a genus Eoanthropus distinct from that of man is to be viewed with reserve. This interpretation would make the Piltdown type more primitive than the probably antecedent Heidelberg man. Some authorities do regard it as both more primitive and earlier.

14. Neandertal Man

The preceding forms are each known only from partial fragments of the bones of a single individual. The Neandertal race is substantiated by some dozens of different finds, including half a dozen nearly complete skulls, and several skeletons of which the greater portions have been preserved. These fossils come from Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, and what was Austro-Hungary, or, roughly, from the whole western half of Europe. They are all of similar type and from the Mousterian period of the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age (§ [70-72], [Fig. 17]); whereas Pithecanthropus, Heidelberg, and perhaps Piltdown are earlier than the Stone Age. The Mousterian period may be dated as coincident with the peak of the last or Würm glaciation, that is, about 50,000 to 25,000 years ago. Its race—the Neandertal type—was clearly though primitively human; which fact is reflected in the various systematic names that have been given it: Homo Neandertalensis, Homo Mousteriensis, or Homo primigenius.

The Most Important Neandertal Discoveries

Neandertal man was short: around 5 feet 3 inches for men, 4 feet 10 inches for women, or about the same as the modern Japanese. A definite curvature of his thigh bone indicates a knee habitually somewhat bent, and probably a slightly stooping or slouching attitude. All his bones are thickset: his musculature must have been powerful. The chest was large, the neck bull-like, the head hung forward upon it. This head was massive: its capacity averaged around 1,550 c.c., or equal to that of European whites and greater than the mean of all living races of mankind ([Fig. 6]). The head was rather low and the forehead sloped back. The supraorbital ridges were heavy: the eyes peered out from under beetling brows. The jaws were prognathous, though not more than in many Australians and Negroes; the chin receded but existed.

Some Neandertal Measurements

The artifacts found in Mousterian deposits show that Neandertal man chipped flint tools in several ways, knew fire, and buried his dead. It may be assumed as almost certain that he spoke some sort of language.

Fig. 6. Skulls of 1, Pithecanthropus; 2, Neandertal man (Chapelle-aux-Saints); 3, Sixth Dynasty Egyptian; 4, Old Man of Cro-Magnon. Combined from Keith. The relatively close approximation of Neandertal man to recent man, and the full frontal development of the Cro-Magnon race, are evident.

15. Rhodesian Man

Quite recent is the discovery of an African fossil man. This occurred in 1921 at Broken Hill Bone Cave in northern Rhodesia. A nearly complete skull was found, though without lower jaw; a small piece of the upper jaw of a second individual; and several other bones, including a tibia. The remains were ninety feet deep in a cave, associated with vast quantities of mineralized animal bones. Their age however is unknown. The associated fauna is one of living species only; but this does not imply the same recency as in Europe, since the animal life of Africa has altered relatively little since well back in the Pleistocene.

Measurements of Rhodesian man have not yet been published. The available descriptions point to a small brain case with low vault in the frontal region; more extremely developed eyebrow ridges than in any living or fossil race of man, including Pithecanthropus; a large gorilla-like face, with marked prognathism and a long stretch between nose and teeth—the area covered by the upper lip; a flaring but probably fairly prominent nose; an enormous palate and dental arch—too large to accommodate even the massive Heidelberg jaw; large teeth, but without the projecting canines of the apes and of the lower jaw attributed to Piltdown man; and a forward position of the foramen magnum—the aperture by which the spinal cord enters the brain—which suggests a fully upright position. The same inference is derivable from the long, straight shin-bone.

On the whole, this seems to be a form most closely allied to Neandertal man, though differing from him in numerous respects, and especially in the more primitive type of face. It is well to remember, however, that of none of the forms anterior to Neandertal man—Pithecanthropus, Heidelberg, Piltdown—has the face been recovered. If these were known, the Rhodesian face might seem less impressively ape-like. It is also important to observe that relatively primitive and advanced features exist side by side in Rhodesian man; the face and eyebrow ridges are somewhat off-set by the prominent nose, erect posture, and long clean limb bones. It is therefore likely that this form was a collateral relative of Neandertal man rather than his ancestor or descendant. Its place in the history of the human species can probably be fixed only after the age of the bones is determined. Yet it is already clear that the discovery is important in at least three respects. It reveals the most ape-like face yet found in a human variety; it extends the record of fossil man to a new continent; and that continent is the home of the two living apes—the gorilla and chimpanzee—recognized as most similar to man.

16. The Cro-Magnon Race

The Cro-Magnon race is not only within the human species, but possibly among the ancestors of modern Europeans. While Neandertal man is still Homo Neandertalensis—the genus of living man, but a different species—the Cro-Magnon type is Homo sapiens—that is, a variety of ourselves. The age is that of the gradual, fluctuating retreat of the glaciers—the later Cave period of the Old Stone Age: the Upper Palæolithic, in technical language, comprising the Aurignacian, the Solutrean, and the Magdalenian (§ [70]). In years, this was the time from 25,000 to 10,000 B.C.

Some Important Remains of Cro-Magnon Type

The Cro-Magnon race of Aurignacian times, as represented by the finds at Cro-Magnon and Grimaldi,[2] was excessively tall and large-brained, surpassing any living race of man in both respects.

The adult male buried at Cro-Magnon measured 5 feet 11 inches in life; five men at Grimaldi measured from 5 feet 10½ inches to 6 feet 4½ inches, averaging 6 feet 1½ inches. The tallest men now on earth, certain Scots and Negroes, average less than 5 feet 11 inches. A girl at Grimaldi measured 5 feet 5 inches. This race was not only tall, but clean-limbed, lithe, and swift.

Their brains were equally large. Those of the five male skulls from Grimaldi contain from over 1,700 to nearly 1,900 c.c.—an average of 1,800 c.c.; that of the old man of Cro-Magnon, nearly 1,600 c.c.; of a woman there, 1,550 c.c. If these individuals were not exceptional, the figures mean that the size and weight of the brain of the early Cro-Magnon people was some fifteen or twenty per cent greater than that of modern Europeans.

The cephalic index is low—that is, the skull was long and narrow, as in all the types here considered; but the face was particularly broad. The forehead rose well domed; the supraorbital development was moderate, as in recent men; the features must have been attractive even by our standards.

Three of the best preserved skeletons of the Magdalenian period are those of women. Their statures run 4 feet 7 inches, 5 feet 1 inch, 5 feet 1 inch, which would indicate a corresponding normal height for men not far from that of the average European of to-day. The male from Obercassel attained a stature of about 5 feet 3 inches, a cranial capacity of 1,500 c.c., and combined a long skull with a wide face. The general type of the Magdalenian period might be described as a reduced Cro-Magnon one.

The Cro-Magnon peoples used skilfully made harpoons, originated a remarkable art, and in general attained a development of industries parallel to their high degree of bodily progress.

17. The Brünn Race

Several remains have been found in central Europe which have sometimes been considered as belonging to the Neandertal race and sometimes to the subsequent Cro-Magnon race, but do not belong clearly with either, and may perhaps be regarded as distinct from both and possibly bridging them. The type is generally known as the Brünn race. Its habitat was Czecho-Slovakia and perhaps adjacent districts; its epoch, postglacial, in the Solutrean period of the Upper Palæolithic (§ [70]). The Brünn race, so far as present knowledge of it goes, was therefore both preceded and succeeded by Cro-Magnon man.

The Brünn race belongs with modern man: its species is no longer Homo Neandertalensis, but Homo sapiens, to which we also belong. The heavy supraorbital ridges of the earlier type are now divided by a depression over the nose instead of stretching continuously across the forehead; the chin is becoming pronounced, the jaws protrude less than in Neandertal man. The skull is somewhat higher and better vaulted. In all these respects there is an approach to the Cro-Magnon race. But the distinctively broad face of the Cro-Magnon people is not in evidence.

A skull of uncertain geologic age, found in 1888 at Galley Hill, near London, is by some linked with the Brünn race. The same is true of an unusually well preserved skeleton found in 1909 at Combe-Capelle, in Périgord, southern France. The period of the Combe-Capelle skeleton is Upper Palæolithic Aurignacian. This was part of the era of the Cro-Magnon race in western Europe; and as the Combe-Capelle remains do not differ much from the Cro-Magnon type, they are best considered as belonging to it.

18. The Grimaldi Race: Neolithic Races

The Grimaldi race is to date represented by only two skeletons, those of a woman and a youth—possibly mother and son—found in 1906 in a grotto at Grimaldi near Mentone, in Italy, close to the French border. They reposed in lower layers, above which subsequent Cro-Magnon burials of Aurignacian date had been made. Their age is therefore early Aurignacian: the beginning of the Upper Palæolithic or later Cave period of the Old Stone Age. The statures are 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 1 inch—the youth was not fully grown; the skull capacities 1,375 and nearly 1,600 c.c.

The outstanding feature of both skeletons is that they bear a number of Negroid characteristics. The forearm and lower leg are long as compared with the upper arm and thigh; the pelvis high and small; the jaws prognathous, the nose flat, the eye orbits narrow. All these are Negro traits. This is important, in view of the fact that all the other ancient fossils of men are either more primitive than the living races or, like Cro-Magnon, perhaps ancestral to the Caucasian race.

No fossil remains of any ancestral Mongolian type have yet been discovered.

The New Stone Age, beginning about 10,000 or 8,000 B.C., brings the Grenelle and other types of man; but these are so essentially modern that they need not be considered here. In the Neolithic period, broad heads are for the first time encountered, as they occur at present in Europe and other continents, alongside of narrow ones. The virtual fixity of the human type for these last ten thousand years is by no means incredible. Egyptian mummies and skeletons prove that the type of that country has changed little in five thousand years except as the result of invasions and admixture.

19. The Metric Expression of Human Evolution

The relations of the several fossil types of man and their gradual progression are most accurately expressed by certain skull angles and proportions, or indexes, which have been specially devised for the purpose. The anthropometric criteria that are of most importance in the study of living races, more or less fail in regard to prehistoric man. The hair, complexion, and eye-color are not preserved. The head breadth, as indicated by the cephalic index, is substantially the same from Pithecanthropus to the last Cro-Magnons. Stature on the other hand varies from one to another ancient race without evincing much tendency to grow or to diminish consistently. Often, too, there is only part of a skull preserved. The following proportions of the top or vault of the skull—the calvarium—are therefore useful for expressing quantitatively the gradual physical progress of humanity from its beginning.

Three anatomical points on the surface of the skull are the pivots on which these special indexes and angles rest. One is the Glabella (G in [figure 7]), the slight swelling situated between the eyebrows and above the root of the nose. The second is the Inion (I), the most rearward point on the skull. The third is the Bregma (B) or point of intersection of the sutures which divide the frontal from the parietal bones. The bregma falls at or very near the highest point of the skull.

If now we see a skull lengthwise, or draw a projection of it, and connect the glabella and the inion by a line GI, and the glabella and the bregma by a line GB, an acute angle, BGI, is formed. This is the “bregma angle.” Obviously a high vaulted skull or one that has the superior point B well forward will show a greater angle than a low flat skull or one with its summit lying far back.

Fig. 7. Indices and angles of special significance in the change from fossil to living man. Calvarial height index, BX: GI. Bregma position index, GX: GI. Bregma angle, BGI. Frontal angle, FGI.

Next, let us drop a vertical from the bregma to the line GI, cutting it at X. Obviously the proportion which the vertical line BX bears to the horizontal line GI will be greater or less as the arch or vault of the brain case is higher or lower. This proportion BX: GI, expressed in percentages, is the “calvarial height index.”

The Skull of Modern and Fossil Man

If now we compute the proportion of the GX part of the line GI to the whole of this line, we have the “bregma position index”; that is, a numerical indication of how far forward on the skull the highest point B lies. A sloping or retreating forehead naturally tends to have the bregma rearward; whereas if the frontal bone is nearly vertical, resulting in a high, domed expanse of forehead, the bregma tends to be situated farther forward, the point X shifts in the same direction, the distance GX becomes shorter in comparison to the whole line GI, and the “bregma position index” falls numerically.

The “frontal angle,” finally, is determined by drawing a line GF from the glabella tangent to the most protruding part of the frontal bone and measuring the angle between this and the horizontal GI. A small frontal angle obviously means a receding forehead.

All these data can be obtained from the mere upper fragment of a skull; they relate to that feature which is probably of the greatest importance in the evolution of man from the lower animals—the development of the brain case and therefore of the brain, especially of the cerebrum or fore-brain; and they define this evolution rather convincingly. The table, which compiles some of the most important findings, shows that progress has been fairly steadily continuous in the direction of greater cerebral development.

CHAPTER III
LIVING RACES

[20.] Race origins.—[21.] Race classification.—[22.] Traits on which classification rests.—[23.] The grand divisions or primary stocks.—[24.] Caucasian races.—[25.] Mongoloid races.—[26.] Negroid races.—[27.] Peoples of doubtful position.—[28.] Continents and oceans.—[29.] The history of race classifications.—[30.] Emergence of the threefold classification.—[31.] Other classifications.—[32.] Principles and conclusions common to all classifications.—[33.] Race, nationality, and language.

20. Race Origins

Almost every one sooner or later becomes interested in the problem of the origin of the human races and the history of their development. We see mankind divided into a number of varieties that differ strikingly in appearance. If these varieties are modifications of a single ancestral form, what caused them to alter, and what has been the history of the change?

In the present state of science, we cannot wholly answer these important questions. We know very little about the causes that change human types; and we possess only incomplete information as to the history of races. Stray bits of evidence here and there are too scattered to afford many helpful clues. The very earliest men, as we know them from fossils, are too far removed from any of the living varieties, are too primitive, to link very definitely with the existing races, which can all be regarded as intergrading varieties of a single species, Homo sapiens. In the latter half of the Old Stone Age, in the Aurignacian period, at a time estimated to have been from twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago, we commence to encounter fossils which seem to foreshadow the modern races. The so-called Grimaldi type of man from this period possesses Negroid affinities, the contemporary Cro-Magnon and perhaps Brünn types evince Caucasian ones. But we know neither the origin nor the precise descendants of these fossil races.[3] They appear and then vanish from the scene. About all that we can conclude from this fragment of evidence is that the races of man as they are spread over the earth to-day must have been at least some tens of thousands of years in forming. What caused them to differentiate, on which part of the earth’s surface each took on its peculiarities, how they further subdivided, what were the connecting links between them, and what happened to these lost links—on all these points the answer of anthropology is as yet incomplete.

It is no different in other fields of biology. As long as the zoölogist or botanist reviews his grand classifications or the wide sweep of organic evolution for fifty million years back, he seems to obtain striking and simple results. When he turns his attention to a small group, attempting to trace in detail its subvarieties, and the relations and history of these, the task is seen to be intricate and the accumulated knowledge is usually insufficient to solve more than a fraction of the problems that arise.

There is, then, nothing unusual in the situation of partial bafflement in which anthropology still finds itself as regards the human races.

21. Race Classification

What remains is the possibility of making an accurate survey of the living races in the hope that the relationships which a classification brings out may indicate something as to the former development of the races. If for instance it could be established that the Ainu or aborigines of Japan are closely similar in their bodies to the peoples of Europe, we would then infer that they are a branch of the Caucasian stock, that their origin took place far to the west of their present habitat, and that they have no connection with the Mongolian Japanese among whom they now live. This is working by indirect evidence, it is true; but sooner or later that is the method to which science always finds itself reduced.

The desirability of a trustworthy classification of the human races will therefore be generally accepted without further argument. But the making of such a classification proves to be more difficult than might be imagined. To begin with, a race is only a sort of average of a large number of individuals; and averages differ from one another much less than individuals. Popular impression exaggerates the differences, accurate measurements reduce them. It is true that a Negro and a north European cannot possibly be confused: they happen to represent extreme types. Yet as soon as we operate with less divergent races we find that variations between individuals of the same race are often greater than differences between the races. The tallest individuals of a short race are taller than the shortest individuals of a tall race. This is called overlapping; and it occurs to such an extent as to make it frequently difficult for the physical anthropologist to establish clear-cut types.

In addition, the lines of demarcation between races have time and again been obliterated by interbreeding. Adjacent peoples, even hostile ones, intermarry. The number of marriages in one generation may be small; but the cumulative effect of a thousand years is often quite disconcerting. The half-breeds or hybrids are also as fertile as each of the original types. There is no question but that some populations are nothing but the product of such race crossing. Thus there is a belt extending across the entire breadth of Africa of which it is difficult to say whether the inhabitants belong to the Negro or to the Caucasian type. If we construct a racial map and represent the demarcation between Negro and Caucasian by a line, we are really misrepresenting the situation. The truth could be expressed only by inserting a transition zone of mixed color. Yet as soon as we allow such transitions, the definiteness of our classification begins to crumble.

In spite of these difficulties, some general truths can be discovered from a careful race classification, and certain constant principles of importance emerge from all the diversity.

22. Traits on Which Classification Rests

Since every human being obviously possesses a large number of physical features or traits, the first thing that the prospective classifier of race must do is to determine how much weight he will attach to each of these features.

The most striking of all traits probably is stature or bodily height. Yet this is a trait which experience has shown to be of relatively limited value for classifactory purposes. The imagination is easily impressed by a few inches when they show at the top of a man and make him half a head taller or shorter than oneself. Except for a few groups which numerically are rather insignificant, there is no human race that averages less than 5 feet in height. There is none at all that averages taller than 5 feet 10 inches. This means that practically the whole range of human variability in height, from the race standpoint, falls within less than a foot. The majority of averages of populations do not differ more than 2 inches from the general human average of 5 feet 5 inches.

Then, too, stature has been proved to be rather readily influenced by environment. Each of us is a fraction of an inch taller when he gets up in the morning than when he goes to bed at night. Two races might differ by as much as a couple of inches in their heredity, and yet if all the individuals of the shorter race were well nourished in a favorable environment, and all those of the taller group were underfed and overworked, the naturally shorter race might well be actually the taller one.

The cephalic index, which expresses in percentage form the ratio of the length and the breadth of the head, is perhaps the most commonly used anthropological measurement.[4] It has certain definite advantages. The head measurements are easily made with accuracy. The index is nearly the same on the living head and on the dead skull; or one is easily converted into the other. This enables present and past generations to be compared. The index is also virtually the same for men and for women, for children and for adults. Finally, it seems to be little affected by environment. The consequence is that head form has been widely investigated. There are few groups of people of consequence whose average cephalic index we do not know fairly accurately. The difficulty about the cephalic index from the point of view of race classification is that it does not yield broad enough results. This index is often useful in distinguishing subtypes, nation from nation, or tribe from tribe; but the primary races are not uniform. There is, for instance, no typical head form for the Caucasian race. There are narrow headed, medium headed, and broad headed Caucasians. The same is true of the American Indians, who are on the whole rather uniform, yet vary much in head form.

The nasal index, which expresses the relation of length and breadth of nose, runs much more constant in the great races. Practically all Negroids are broad-nosed, practically all Caucasians narrow-nosed, and the majority of peoples of Mongolian affinities medium-nosed. But the nasal index varies according to the age of the person; it is utterly different in a living individual and a skull;[5] it seems to reflect heredity less directly than the cephalic index; and finally it tells us nothing about the elevation or profile or general formation of the nose.

Prognathism, or the degree of the protrusion of the jaws, is a conspicuous feature of the profile, and would seem to be of some historic importance as a sign of primitiveness, because all other mammals are more prognathous than man. The trait also has a general correlation with the fundamental racial types. Negroes are almost all prognathous, people of Mongolian type moderately so, Caucasians very slightly. Prognathism is however difficult to measure or to denote in figures. Various apparatuses have been devised without wholly satisfactory results.

The capacity of the skull is measured by filling it with shot or millet seed. The latter yields figures that are lower by 50 or 100 c.c. The average, by shot measure, for males the world over is about 1,450 to 1,500 c.c., for females about 10 per cent lower. European males range from 1,500 to 1,600, Asiatic Mongoloids but little less, American Indians and Polynesians from 1,400 to 1,500, Bushmen, Australians, Tasmanians, Negritos, Veddas from 1,300 to 1,400. These last groups are all small bodied. It appears that cranial capacity is considerably dependent on bodily size. Slender as well as short races run to small capacities. The heavy Bantu surpass the slighter framed Sudanese, and Hindus stand well below European Caucasians; just as the shorter Japanese average less than the Chinese. Broad headed populations show greater cranial capacity than narrow headed ones: Alpine Europeans (§ [24]) generally surpass Nordics in spite of their shorter stature. Individual variability is also unusually great in this measurement. The largest and smallest skulled healthy individuals of the same sex in one population differ sometimes by 500, 600, or 700 c.c., or more than one-third of the racial average. Overlapping between races is accordingly particularly marked in cranial capacity. Furthermore, the measurement obviously cannot be taken on the living. In spite of its interest as an alleged and perhaps partially valid index of mental faculty, cranial capacity is thus of restricted value in distinguishing races.

The texture of the hair is now universally regarded as one of the most valuable criteria for classifying races, possibly the most significant of all. Hair is distinguished as woolly in the Negro, straight in the Mongolian, and wavy or intermediate in the Caucasian. This texture depends principally on the diameters of each individual hair, as they are revealed in cross-section under the microscope; in part also on the degree of straightness or curvature of the root sacs of the hair in the skin. Hair texture seems to run rather rigidly along hereditary racial lines, and to be uninfluenced by factors of age, sex, climate, or nourishment.

Hairiness of the body as a whole is another trait to which more and more attention is coming to be paid. The fullness or scantiness of the beard, and the degree of development of the down which covers the body, are its most conspicuous manifestations. Caucasians are definitely a hairy race, Mongoloids and most Negroids glabrous or smooth-skinned. It is largely on the basis of their hairiness that races like the Australians have been separated from the Negroids, and the Ainus from the Japanese.

Except possibly for stature, color is probably the most conspicuous trait of any race. Under color must be included the complexion of the skin, the color of the hair, and the color of the eyes. All of these however present difficulties to the anthropometrist. The pigment in every human skin is the same: it differs only in amount. We have therefore a complete series of transition shades, and it is difficult to express these differences of shade quantitatively. They readily impress the eye, but it is far from easy to denote them accurately in numbers. Environment also affects skin color markedly. A day’s exposure to the sun will darken an individual’s complexion by several shades. In spite of these drawbacks, however, complexion remains sufficiently important to have to be considered in every classification.

Hair color and eye color are practically immune against direct change by environment. They unquestionably are excellent hereditary criteria, although they offer much the same resistance to measurement as does complexion. The utility of these two traits is however limited by another factor: their narrow distribution. Blue eyes and blond hair are racially characteristic of only a single subrace, that of northern Europe. In central Europe they are already much toned down: the prevailing type here is brunet. In southern Europe, blue eyes and blondness scarcely occur at all except where admixture with northern peoples can be traced. Outside of the Caucasian stock, black hair and black eyes are the universal rule for the human family.

Obviously it would be easiest to arrive at a clear-cut classification by grouping all the peoples of the earth according to a single trait, such as the shape of the nose, or color. But any such classification must be artificial and largely unsound, just because it disregards the majority of traits. The only classification that can claim to rest upon a true or natural basis is one which takes into consideration as many traits as possible, and weights the important more heavily than the unimportant features. If the outcome of such a grouping is to leave some peoples intermediate or of doubtful place in the classification, this result is unfortunate but must be accepted.

Racial Classification of Mankind

Hair and eyes are “black” unless otherwise stated in Remarks.

23. The Grand Divisions or Primary Stocks

If now we follow this plan and review the peoples of the earth, each with reference to all its physical traits, we obtain an arrangement something like that which is given in the table on the previous page. It will be seen that there are three grand divisions, of which the European, the Negro, and the Chinaman may be taken as representative. These three primary classes are generally called Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid. The color terms, White, Black, and Yellow, are also often used, but it is necessary to remember that they are employed merely as brief convenient labels, and that they have no descriptive value. There are millions of Caucasians who are darker in complexion than millions of Mongoloids.

These three main groups account for more than nine-tenths of all the nations and tribes of the world. As to the number of individuals, they comprise probably 99 per cent of all human beings. The aberrant forms are best kept separate. Some of them, like the before-mentioned Ainu and Australians, appear to affiliate preponderantly with one of the three great classes, but still differ sufficiently in one or more particulars to prevent their being included with them outright. Other groups, such as the Polynesians, seem to be, at least in part, the result of a mixture of races. Their constituent elements are so blended, and perhaps so far modified after the blending, as to be difficult to disentangle.

Each of the three great primary stocks falls into several natural subdivisions.

24. Caucasian Races

Three of the four Caucasian races live, in whole or part, in Europe; the fourth consists of the Hindus.[6] The three European races are the Nordic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean. Some authorities recognize a greater number, but all admit at least these three. They occupy horizontal belts on the map. Beginning with the Nordic and ending with the Mediterranean they may be described as successively darker skinned, darker eyed, darker haired, and shorter in stature. The Alpine race, which lies between the two others, is however more than a mere transition; for it is broad headed, whereas the Nordic and Mediterranean are both narrow or long headed. The Nordic type is essentially distributed around the Baltic and North seas. The Mediterranean race occupies the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe. In ancient times it seems to have prevailed everywhere along these coasts. At present the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor are mostly occupied by broad headed peoples of more or less close affinity to the Alpines. This Alpine race is perhaps less homogeneous than the two others. A central Frenchman, a Serb, a Russian, and an Armenian are clearly far from identical (§ [30]). They have enough in common, however, to warrant their being put in the one larger group.

It must be clearly understood that these races have nothing to do with the modern political nationalities of Europe. Northern Germany is prevailingly Nordic, southern Germany, Alpine. Northern Italy is Alpine, the rest of the peninsula Mediterranean. All three races are definitely represented in France. The average north Frenchman stands racially nearer to the north German than to his countryman from central France, whereas the latter links up in physical type with the south German. Nationality is determined by speech, customs, religion, and political affiliations. Its boundary lines and those of race cut right across one another.

The British Isles did not escape the process of race blending that has gone on in Europe for thousands of years. The bulk of the blood of their inhabitants during the past thousand years has been Nordic, but there is an Alpine strain, and most authorities recognize a definite “Iberian,” that is, Mediterranean element. The first settlers in America carried this mixture across the Atlantic, and through the years immigration has increased its compositeness. Scandinavians and north Germans have added to the Nordic component in the population of the United States; south Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, and Jews to the Alpine; the Italians have injected a definite Mediterranean element. The Negro alone has not been admitted into the make-up of our white society; but the reverse holds: a considerable and growing percentage of the “colored” people in the United States are from one-sixteenth to fifteen-sixteenths Caucasian.

The Hindu is in the main a narrow headed, dark skinned Caucasian, not very different from the Mediterranean. When he entered India he probably found there an aboriginal population which may have been Negroid but more likely was related to the Australians or perhaps constituted a dark proto-Caucasian or Indo-Australian race. A fairly thorough intermixture has taken place in India during the last three thousand years, with the result that the originally pure Caucasian type of the Hindu has been somewhat modified, while most of the less numerous or less vigorous aboriginal population has become submerged. The definite Caucasian type is best preserved in the north; the traces of the dark skinned aboriginal race are strongest in southern India.

25. Mongoloid Races

The Mongoloid stock divides into the Mongolian proper of eastern Asia, the Malaysian of the East Indies, and the American Indian. The differences between these three types are not very great. The Mongolian proper is the most extreme or pronounced form. It was probably the latest to develop its present characteristics. For instance, the oblique or “Mongolian” eye is a peculiarity restricted to the people of eastern Asia. The original Mongoloid stock must be looked upon as having been more like present-day Malaysians or American Indians, or intermediate between them. From this generalized type peoples like the Chinese gradually diverged, adding the epicanthic fold of the oblique eye and other peculiarities, while the less civilized peoples of America and Oceania kept more nearly to the ancient type.

Within the East Indies, a more and a less specifically Mongoloid strain can at times be distinguished. The latter has often been called Indonesian. In certain respects, such as relatively short stature and broad nose, it approaches the Indo-Australian type described below. Among the American Mongoloids, the Eskimo appears to be the most particularized subvariety.

26. Negroid Races

The Negroid stock falls into two large divisions, the African Negro proper, and the Oceanic Melanesian; besides a third division, the Dwarf Blacks or Negritos, who are very few in numbers but possess a wide and irregular distribution. The Negroes and the Melanesians, in spite of their being separated by the breadth of the Indian Ocean, are clearly close relatives. A trained observer can distinguish them at sight, but a novice would take a Papuan from New Guinea or a Melanesian from the Solomon or Fiji Islands to be an African. Perhaps the most conspicuous difference is that the broad nose of the African Negro is flat, the broad nose of the Melanesian often aquiline. How these two so similar Negroid branches came to be located on the opposite sides of a great ocean is a fact that remains unexplained.

The Negrito or Dwarf Negroid race has representatives in New Guinea, in the Philippines, in the Malay Peninsula, in the Andaman Islands, and in equatorial Africa. These peoples are the true pygmies of the human species. Wherever they are racially pure the adult males are less than 5 feet in stature. They also differ from other Negroids in being relatively broad headed. Their skin color, hair texture, nose form, and most other traits are, however, the same as those of the other Negroids. Their scattered distribution is difficult to account for. It is possible that they are an ancient and primitive type which once inhabited much wider stretches of territory than now in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. On account of their inoffensiveness and backwardness, the Negritos, according to this theory, were gradually crowded to the wall by the larger, more energetic populations with which they came in contact, until only a few scattered fragments of them now remain.

The Bushmen and in some degree the Hottentots of South Africa may also be provisionally included with the Negritos, although distinctive in a number of respects. They are yellowish-brown in complexion, long headed, short and flat eared, short legged, hollow backed, and steatopygous. On the whole Negroid characteristics prevail among them. They are, for instance, frizzy-haired. Their extremely short stature may justify their tentative inclusion among the Negritos.

27. Peoples of Doubtful Position

One thing is common to the peoples who are here reckoned as of doubtful position in the classification: they all present certain Caucasian affinities without being similar enough to the recognized Caucasians to be included with them. This is true of the black, wavy-haired, prognathous, beetling-browed Australians, whose first appearance suggests that they are Negroids, as it is of the brown Polynesians, who appear to have Mongoloid connections through the Malaysians. In India, Indo-China, and the East Indies live a scattered series of uncivilized peoples more or less alike in being dark, short, slender, wavy haired, longish headed, broad nosed. The brows are knit, the eyes deep set, the mouth large, beard development medium. Resemblances are on the one hand toward the Caucasian type, on the other toward the Australian, just as the geographical position is intermediate. The name Indo-Australian is thus appropriate for this group. Typical representatives are the Vedda of Ceylon; the Irula and some of the Kolarian tribes of India; many of the Moi of several parts of Indo-China; the Senoi or Sakai of the Malay Peninsula; the Toala of Celebes. These are almost invariably hill or jungle people, who evidently represent an old stratum of population, pushed back by Caucasians or Mongoloids, or almost absorbed by them. The dark strain in India seems more probably due to these people than to any true Negroid infusion. Possibly the Indo-Australians branched off from the Caucasian stem at a very early time before the Caucasian stock was as “white” as it is now. In the lapse of ages the greater number of the Caucasians in and near Europe took on, more and more, their present characteristics, whereas this backward branch in the region of the Indian Ocean kept its primitive and undifferentiated traits. This is a tempting theory to pursue, but it extends so far into the realm of the hypothetical that its just appraisal must be left to the specialist.

Fig. 8. Relationship of the human races. Distances between the centers of circles are indicative of the degree of similarity.

[Figure 8] attempts to represent graphically the degree of resemblance and difference between the principal physical types as they have been summarized in the table and preceding discussion; the genealogical tree in [figure 9] is an endeavor to suggest how these types may have diverged from one another in their development.

Fig. 9. Tentative family tree of the human races.

28. Continents and Oceans

One fact about the classification stands out clearly, namely, that the three grand races are not limited to particular continents. It is true that the center of gravity of the Caucasians is in or near Europe, that the biggest block of Negroids is situated in Africa, and the largest mass of Mongoloids in Asia. It is even possible that these three types evolved on these three continents. But each of them is inter-continental in its present distribution. Western Asia and northern Africa as well as Europe are Caucasian. There are Negroids in Oceania as well as in Africa, and the Mongoloids are found over Oceania, Asia, and both Americas.

In fact the distribution of the three primary races can better be described as oceanically marginal than as continental. The Caucasian parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa surround the Mediterranean Sea. The African and the Oceanic branches of the Negroid race are situated on the left and right sides of the Indian Ocean. The Mongoloid habitat in Oceania, in eastern Asia, and in North and South America almost encloses the Pacific Ocean. (Figs. [10] and [11].)

29. The History of Race Classifications

Most of the early classifications of mankind tried to identify races and continents too closely. The first attempt was that of Linnæus in the middle of the eighteenth century. He distinguished and described four varieties of mankind, which he called Europæus albus, Asiaticus luridus, Americanus rufus, and Afer niger; that is, European White, Asiatic Yellow, American Red, African Black.

The next classification, that of Blumenbach in 1775, is essentially the same except for adding a fifth or Oceanic variety. Blumenbach’s five human races, the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan, still survive in many of the geographies of our elementary schools, usually under the designations of White, Yellow, Black, Red, and Brown; but they no longer receive scientific recognition.

Fig. 10. Outline distribution of the primary racial stocks of mankind according to the three-fold classification, Australians, Ainu, Vedda, Polynesians, etc., being included in the stock with which they appear to affiliate most closely. A larger map with more shadings would be required to do even approximate justice to the intricacies of a complete race classification.

Fig. 11. Circumpolar map of primary race distribution (legend as in [Figure 10]).

As time went on, the continental principle of race classification came to be recognized as inadequate, and there was a tendency among anthropologists to accept the distinctness of certain specialized groups like the Australians, Bushmen, Eskimo, and Ainu, which were often elevated into races substantially equal in rank with the great races like the Mongoloid. Thus Peschel distinguished: (1) Mediterranean or Caucasian; (2) Mongoloid (including the East Indians and Americans); (3) Negro; (4) Australian; but then separated off (5) Dravida of southern India; (6) Papuans, and (7) Hottentot-Bushmen, as if these smaller groups were coördinate with the grand ones. Nott and Gliddon also recognized seven races, although somewhat different ones: European, Asiatic, Negro, American, Malay, Australian, and Arctic. This is the fivefold scheme of Blumenbach with Australian and Arctic added.

30. Emergence of the Threefold Classification

On the other hand the feeling gained ground, especially as the result of the labors of French anthropologists, that mankind could be satisfactorily accounted for by a division into Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Those who adopted this principle tried to fit divergent types like the Australians and Polynesians into one or the other of these three great groups. Some little doctoring had to be done in this process, and some salient facts estimated rather lightly. It is for this reason that it has seemed best here not to make our tripartite classification too exhaustive. This threefold classification clearly absorbs the great mass of mankind without straining, but it is soundest to recognize that this same basic classification requires a certain margin of extensions along the lines indicated in our table.

The classification made by the French anthropologist Deniker is one of the most elaborate yet devised. It recognizes 6 grand divisions, 17 minor divisions, and 29 separate races. The primary criterion of classification is hair texture.

Deniker’s Classification

• A. Hair woolly, with broad nose.
• I. 1. Bushman.
• II. Negroid.
• 2. Negrito.
• 3. Negro.
• 4. Melanesian (including Papuan of New Guinea).
• B. Hair curly to wavy.
• III. 5. Ethiopian (Sudan, etc.).
• IV. 6. Australian.
• V. 7. Dravidian (southern India).
• VI. 8. Assyroid (Kurds, Armenians, Jews).
• C. Hair Wavy.
• VII. 9. Indo-Afghan.
• VIII. North African.
• 10. Arab or Semite.
• 11. Berber (N. Africa).
• IX. Melanochroid.
• 12. Littoral (W. Mediterranean).
• 13. Ibero-insular (Spain, S. Italy).
• 14. Western European.
• 15. Adriatic (N. Italy, Balkans).
• D. Hair wavy to straight, with light eyes.
• X. Xanthochroid.
• 16. North European.
• 17. East European.
• E. Hair wavy to straight, with dark eyes.
• XI. 18. Ainu.
• XII. Oceanian.
• 19. Polynesian.
• 20. Indonesian (East Indies).
• F. Hair straight.
• XIII. American.
• 21. South American.
• 22. North American.
• 23. Central American.
• 24. Patagonian.
• XIV. 25. Eskimo.
• XV. 26. Lapp.
• XVI. Eurasian.
• 27. Ugrian (E. Russia).
• 28. Turco-Tartar (S.W. Siberia).
• XVII. 29. Mongol (E. Asia).

In spite of its apparent complexity, this classification coincides quite closely with the classification which is followed in this book. Inspection reveals that Deniker’s grand division A is Negroid, C and D Caucasian, F Mongoloid. Of his two remaining grand divisions, B is intermediate between A and C, that is, between Negroid and Caucasian, and consists of peoples which are either, like the East Africans, the probable result of a historical mixture of Negroids and Caucasians, or which, like the Australians, share the traits of both, and are therefore admitted to have a doubtful status. The other grand division, E, is transitional between Caucasian D and Mongoloid F, and the peoples of which it consists are those whom we too have recognized as difficult to assign positively to either stock. In short, Deniker’s classification is much the more refined, ours the simpler; but essentially they corroborate one another.

31. Other Classifications

Another classification that puts hair texture into the forefront is that of F. Müller. This runs as follows:

• A. Ulotrichi or Woolly-haired.
• 1. Lophocomi or Tuft-haired: Papua, Hottentot-Bushmen.
• 2. Eriocomi or Fleecy-haired: African Negroes.
• B. Lissotrichi or Straight-haired.
• 3. Euthycomi or Stiff-haired: Australian, Malay, Mongolian, Arctic, American.
• 4. Euplocomi or Wavy-haired: Dravidian (S. India), Nubian, (Sudan), “Mediterranean” (Europe, N. Africa, etc.).

The distinction here made between the Tuft and Fleecy-haired groups is unsound. It rests on a false observation: that a few races, like the Bushmen, had their head-hair growing out of the scalp only in spots or tufts. With the elimination of this group, its members would fall into the Fleecy or Woolly-haired one, which would thus comprise all admitted Negroids; whereas the two remaining groups, the Stiff and Wavy-haired, obviously correspond to the Mongoloid and Caucasian. The only remaining peculiarity of the classification—and in this point also it is unquestionably wrong—is the inclusion of the Australians in the Stiff or Straight-haired group. But even this error reflects an element of truth: it emphasizes the fact that in spite of their black skins, broad noses, and protruding jaws, the Australians are not straight-out Negroids.

The underlying feature of this classification, after allowing for its errors, is that mankind consists of two rather than three main branches: the Ulotrichi or Negroids, as opposed to the Lissotrichi or combined Mongoloids and Caucasians. This basic idea has been advocated by others. Boas, for instance, reckons Mongoloids and Caucasians as at bottom only subtypes of a single stock with which the Negroids and Australians are to be contrasted.

Somewhat different in plan is Huxley’s scheme, which recognizes four main races, or five including a transitional one. These are (1) Australioids, including Dravidians and Egyptians; (2) Negroids, with the Bushmen and the Oceanic Papuans, Melanesians, Tasmanians, and Negritos as two subvarieties; (3) Mongoloids, as customarily accepted; (4) Xanthochroi, about equivalent to Nordics and Alpines; (5) Melanochroi, nearly the same as the Mediterraneans, but supposed by Huxley to be hybrid or intermediate between the Xanthochroi and Australioids. This classification in effect emphasizes the connection between Australoids and Caucasians, with the Negroids as a distinctive group on one side and the Mongoloids on the other.

Haeckel’s classification is basically similar, in that besides the usual three primary stocks—which he elevates into species—he recognizes a separate group comprising the Australians, Dravidians, and Vedda-like Indo-Australians.

32. Principles and Conclusions Common to All Classifications

It will be seen that in spite of the differences and uncertainties as yet prevalent in any scheme for classifying the human species, certain principles stand out both as regards method and results; and in regard to these principles there is substantial agreement.

First, any valid classification must rest on a combination of as many traits or features as possible.

Second, several features of the human body are of definite significance for the discrimination of races. Hair and hairiness are unquestionably of great importance; stature, except in extreme cases, much less so. Color differences in the skin, hair, or eyes are important but difficult to handle. Shape of nose and prognathism are useful for rough classification. The cephalic index possesses an exceptional utility in making the finer discriminations.

Third, it is clearly impossible to find a simple and consistent scheme within which all the varieties of man can be placed. We must not attempt more than nature allows.

On the other hand the vast bulk of mankind does fall naturally into three great divisions, each of which again subdivides into three or four principal branches, in regard to whose distinctness there is no serious difference of opinion. The scattering remainder of races are allied sometimes to one primary stock, sometimes to another, but always with some special peculiarities.

From such a classification as this, especially after the accumulation of large series of accurate measurements which will permit its being worked out to greater exactness, we may hope ultimately to reconstruct the full and true history of the races of men, or, in any event, some reasonable hypothesis as to their development. As yet, however, we are not in a position to account for the origin of the races except speculatively.

33. Race, Nationality, and Language

The term race has here been used in its biological sense, for a group united in blood or heredity. A race is a subdivision of a species and corresponds to a breed in domestic animals. Popularly, the word is used in a different sense, namely that of a population having any traits in common, be they hereditary or non-hereditary, biological or social (Chapter [I]). It is customary, but scientifically inaccurate, to speak of the French race, the Anglo-Saxon race, the Gypsy race, the Jewish race. The French are a nation and nationality, with a substantially common speech; biologically, they are three races considerably mixed, but still imperfectly blended (§ [24]). Anglo-Saxon refers primarily to speech, incidentally to a set of customs, traditions, and points of view that are more or less associated with the language. The Gypsies are a self-constituted caste, with folkways, occupations, and a speech of their own. The Jews, who were once a nationality, at present, of course, form a religious body, which somewhat variably, in part from inner cohesion and in part from outer pressure, tends also to constitute a caste. They evince little hereditary racial type, measurements indicating that in each country they approximate the physical type of the gentile population.

It may seem of little moment whether the word race is restricted to its strict biological sense or used more loosely. In fact, however, untold loose reasoning has resulted from the loose terminology. When one has spoken a dozen times of “the French race,” one tends inevitably to think of the inhabitants of France as a biological unit, which they are not. The basis of the error is confusion of organic traits and processes with superorganic or cultural ones; of heredity with tradition or imitation. That civilizations, languages, and nationalities go on for generations is obviously a different thing from their being caused by generation. Slovenly thought, tending to deal with results rather than causes or processes, does not trouble to make this discrimination, and every-day speech, dating from a pre-scientific period, is ambiguous about it. We say not only “generation,” when there is no intent to imply the reproductive process, but “good breeding” (literally, good brooding or hatching or birth), when we mean good home training or education; just as we “inherit” a fortune or a name—social things—as well as ineradicable traits like brown eye-color. Biology has secured for its processes the exclusive use of the term “heredity”; and biologists employ the term “race” only with reference to a hereditary subdivision of a species. It is equally important that the word be used with the same exact denotation in anthropology, else all discussion of race degenerates irretrievably into illogical sliding in and out between organic and social factors. The inherently great difficulties which beset the understanding and solution of what are generally called race problems, as discussed in the next chapter, are considerably increased by a confusion between what is and what is not racial and organic and hereditary.

CHAPTER IV
PROBLEMS OF RACE

[34.] Questions of endowment and their validity.—[35.] Plan of inquiry.—[36.] Anatomical evidence on evolutionary rank.—[37.] Comparative physiological data.—[38.] Disease.—[39.] Causes of cancer incidence.—[40.] Mental achievement and social environment.—[41.] Psychological tests on the sense faculties.—[42.] Intelligence tests.—[43.] Status of hybrids.—[44.] Evidence from the cultural record of races.—[45.] Emotional bias.—[46.] Summary.

34. Questions of Endowment and Their Validity

Are the human races alike or dissimilar in mentality and character? Are some lower than others, or are they all on a plane as regards potentiality? The answers to these questions are of theoretical import, and naturally also bear on the solution of the practical race problems with which many nations are confronted.

As long as an inquiry remains sufficiently abstract or remote, the desirability of such inquiry is likely to go unquestioned. As soon, however, as investigation touches conduct—for instance, our actual relations with other races—a sentiment has a way of rising, to the effect that perhaps after all the problem does not so much call for knowledge as for action. Thus, in regard to the negro problem in the United States, it is likely to be said that the immediate issue is what may be the best attitude toward “Jim Crow” cars and other forms of segregation. Are these desirable or undesirable, fair or unfair? Here are specific problems which an actual condition presses to have answered. Under the circumstances, it will be said, is not an inquiry into the innate capacity of the negro rather remote, especially when every one can see by a thousand examples that the negro is obviously inferior to the Caucasian? He is poorer, more shiftless, less successful. He has made no inventions, produced no geniuses. He clearly feels himself inferior and comports himself accordingly. Why then raise the issue of capacity at all, unless from a desire to befog it, to subvert the conclusions of common sense and every-day experience by special pleading which substitutes adroitness for sincerity? When a prisoner has been found guilty it is the judge’s business to determine the length of sentence, to decide how far justice should be tempered with mercy. Were he to reopen the case from the beginning, he would be showing partiality. Is not the situation of the scientist proposing to inquire into the accepted verdict that the negro is inferior to the Caucasian, analogous to that of a judge who insists on setting aside the verdict of twelve unprejudiced jurymen in order to retry the defendant himself? In some such form as this, objections may rise in the minds of some.

The answer to such criticism is first of all that racial inferiority and superiority are by no means self-evident truths. Secondly, the belief in race inequalities is founded in emotion and action and then justified by reasoning. That is, the belief is rationalized, not primarily inferred by pure reason. It may be true, but it is not proved true.

As to what is self-evident, there is nothing so misleading as direct observation. We see the sun move and the earth stand still. It is “self-evident” that the sun revolves around the earth. Yet after thousands of years the civilized portion of mankind finally came to believe that it was the earth that spun. Science had no perverse interest, no insidious motive, in advocating the Copernican instead of the Ptolemaic system; in fact, was driven to its new belief gradually and reluctantly. It was pre-scientific humanity, with its direct, homespun, every-day observation, which had really prejudged the matter, and which, because it had always assumed that the earth was flat and stationary, and because every idiot could see that it was so, long combated the idea that it could be otherwise.

As to opinions founded in emotion and subsequently rationalized, instead of being evolved by pure reason from evidence, it may suffice to quote from a famous book on herd instinct, as to the relation of mass opinion and science:

“When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.

“Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore, we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favorable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may both show by their attitude that the belief is held instinctively and non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.”

Take the attitude of the average Californian or Australian about the Mongolian; of the Texan about the Mexican; of the Southerner about the Negro; of the Westerner about the local tribes of Indians; of the Englishman about the Hindu—is not their feeling exactly described by the statement that inquiry into the possibility of racial equality would be “unnecessary,” “absurd,” or evilly motivated; and that their belief in race superiority rests on an “a priori synthesis of the most perfect sort,” and possesses “the quality of primary certitude”?

In short, the apparently theoretical beliefs held as to race capacity by people who are actually confronted by a race conflict or problem are by no means the outcome of impartial examination and verification, but are the result of the decisions taken and emotions experienced in the course of acts performed toward the other race. The beliefs rest ultimately on impulse and feeling; their reasoned support is a subsequent bolstering up. Of course, the fact that a belief springs from emotion does not render that belief untrue, but does leave it scientifically unproved, and calling for investigation.

These conclusions may vindicate inquiry into the relative capacity of races from the charge of being finespun, insidious, impractical, or immoral.

35. Plan of Inquiry

In approach to the problem, a consideration stands out. If the human races are identical in capacity, or if, though not absolutely alike, they average substantially the same in the sum total of their capacities, then such differences as they have shown in their history or show in their present condition must evidently be the result mainly of circumstances external to heredity. In that case, knowledge of the historical or environmental circumstances, and analysis of the latter, become all-important to understanding. On the other hand, if hereditary racial inequalities exist, one can expect that the historical or cultural influences, however great they may be, will nevertheless tend to have their origin in the hereditary factors and to reinforce them. In that case, differences between two groups would be due partly to underlying heredity and partly to overlying cultural forces tending on the whole in the same direction. Yet even in that case, before one could begin to estimate the strength of the true racial factors, the historical ones would have to be subtracted. Thus, in either event, the first crux of the problem lies in the recognition and stripping off of cultural, social, or environmental factors, so far as possible, from the complex mass of phenomena which living human groups present. In proportion as these social or acquired traits can be determined and discounted, the innate and truly racial ones will be isolated, and can then be examined, weighed, and compared. Such, at any rate, is a reasonable plan of procedure. We are looking for the inherent, ineradicable elements in a social animal that has everywhere built up around himself an environment—namely, his culture—in which he mentally lives and breathes. It is precisely because in the present inquiry we wish to get below the effects of culture that we must be ready to concern ourselves considerably with these effects, actual or possible.

36. Anatomical Evidence on Evolutionary Rank

But first of all it may be well to consider the relatively simple evidence which has to do with the physical form and structure of race types. If one human race should prove definitely nearer to the apes in its anatomy than the other races, there would be reason to believe that it had lagged in evolution. Also there would be some presumption that its arrears were mental as well as physical.

But the facts do not run consistently. One thinks of the Negro as simian. His jaws are prognathous; his forehead recedes; his nose is both broad and low. Further, it is among Caucasians that the antithetical traits occur. In straightness of jaws and forehead, prominence and narrowness of nose, Caucasians in general exceed the Mongoloids. Thus the order as regards these particular traits is: ape, Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasian. With ourselves at one end and the monkey at the other, the scale somehow seems right. It appeals, and seems significant. Facts of this sort are therefore readily observed, come to be remembered, and rise spontaneously to mind in an argument on race differences.

However, there are numerous items that conflict with this sequence. For instance, one of the most conspicuous differences of man from the apes is his relative hairlessness. Of the three main stocks, however, it is the Caucasian that is the most hairy. Both Mongoloids and Negroids are more smooth-skinned on face and on body.

In hair texture, the straight-haired Mongoloid is nearest the apes, the wavy-haired Caucasian comes next, and the woolly Negroid is the most characteristically human, or at least unsimian.

In the length of head hair, in which man differs notably from the monkeys, the relatively short-haired Negro once more approximates most closely to the ape, but the long-haired Mongoloid surpasses the intermediate Caucasian in degree of departure.

Lip color reverses this order. The apes’ lips are thin and grayish; Mongoloid lips come next; then those of Caucasians; the full, vivid, red lips of the Negro are the most unapelike of all.

It is unnecessary to multiply examples. If one human racial stock falls below others in certain traits, it rises above them in other features, insofar as “below” and “above” may be measurable in terms of degree of resemblance to the apes. The only way in which a decision could be arrived at along this line of consideration would be to count all features to see whether the Negro or the Caucasian or the Mongoloid was the most unapelike in the plurality of cases. It is possible that in such a reckoning the Caucasian would emerge with a lead. But it is even more clear that whichever way the majority fell, it would be a well divided count. If the Negro were more apelike than the Caucasian in all of his features, or in eight out of ten, the fact would be heavily significant. With his simian resemblances aggregating to those of the Caucasian in a ratio of say four to three, the margin would be so close as to lose nearly all its meaning. It is apparently some such ratio as this, or an even more balanced one, that would emerge, so far as we can judge, if it were feasible to take a census of all features.

It should be added that such a method of comparison as this suffers from two drawbacks. First, the most closely related forms now and then diverge sharply in certain particulars; and second, a form which on the whole is highly specialized may yet have remained more primitive, or have reverted to greater primitiveness in a few of its traits, than relatively unevolved races or species.

Thus, the anthropoid apes are brachycephalic, but all known types of Palæolithic man are dolichocephalic. Matched against the apes, the long-headed Negro would therefore seem to be the most humanly specialized stock. Compared however with the fossil human forms, the Negro is the most primitive in this feature, and the Mongoloid and Alpine Caucasian could be said to have evolved the farthest because their heads are the roundest. Yet their degree of brachycephaly is approximately that of the anthropoid apes. To which criterion shall be given precedence? It is impossible to say. Quite likely the round-headedness of the apes represents a special trait which they acquired since their divergence from the common hominid ancestral stem. If so, their round-headedness and that of the Mongoloids is simply a case of convergent evolution, of a character repeating independently, and therefore no evidence of Mongoloid primitiveness. Yet, if so, the long-headedness common to the early human races and the modern Negroids would probably also mean nothing.

It is even clearer that other traits have been acquired independently, have been secondarily evolved over again. Thus the supraorbital ridges. When one observes the consistency with which these are heavy in practically all Neandertal specimens; how they are still more conspicuous in Pithecanthropus and Rhodesian man; how the male gorilla shows them enormously developed; and that among living races they are perhaps strongest in the lowly Australian, it is tempting to look upon this bony development as a definite sign of primitiveness. Yet there is an array of contradicting facts. The youthful gorilla and adult orang are without supraorbital development. The male gorilla has his powerful brows for the same reason that he has the crest along the top of his skull: they are needed as attachments for his powerful musculature. They are evidently a secondary sex character developed within the species. So among fossil men there seem to have been two strains: one represented by Pithecanthropus and Neandertal man and the Rhodesian race, which tended toward supraorbital massiveness; and another, of which Piltdown man is representative, which was smooth of forehead. Among living races the Asiatic Mongoloids lack marked supraorbital development; the closely related American Indians possess it rather strongly; Caucasians and Negroes show little of the feature; Australians most of all. Evidently it would be unsafe to build much conclusion on either the presence or absence of supraorbital ridges.

Perhaps these instances will suffice to show that even the mere physical rating of human races is far from a simple or easy task. It is doubtful whether as yet it is valid to speak of one race as physically higher or more advanced, or more human and less brutish, than another. This is not an outright denial of the possibility of such differential ratings: it is a denial only of the belief that such differentials have been established as demonstrable.

37. Comparative Physiological Data

There is another angle of approach. This consists in abandoning the direct attempt to rate the races in anatomical terms, and inquiring instead whether they show any physiological differences. If such differences can be found, they may then perhaps be interpretable as differences in activity, responsiveness, endurance, or similar constitutional qualities. If the bodies of two races behave differently, we should have considerable reason to believe that their minds also behaved differently.

Unfortunately, we possess fewer data on comparative physiology than on comparative anatomy. The evidence is more fluctuating and intricate, and requires more patience to assemble. Unfortunately, too, for the purposes of our inquiry, the races come out almost exactly alike in the simpler physiological reactions. The normal body temperature for Caucasian adults is 37° (98.5 F.), the pulse about 70, the respiration rate around 17 or 18 per minute. If the Negro’s temperature averaged even a degree higher, one might expect him to behave, normally, a little more feverishly, to respond to stimulus with more vehemence, to move more quickly or more restlessly. Or, if the pulse rate of Mongolians were definitely lower, they might be expected to react more sluggishly, more sedately, like aging Caucasians. But such observations as are available, though they are far from as numerous as is desirable, reveal no such differences: temperature, pulse, respiration, record the same as among Caucasians, or differ so slightly, or so conflictingly, as to leave no room for positive conclusions. Certainly if there existed any important racial peculiarities, they would have been noted by the physicians who at one time or another have examined millions of Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, and thousands of Indians and Polynesians.

Apparently there is only one record that even hints at anything significant. Hrdlička, among some 700 Indians of the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico, found the pulse to average about 60 per minute, or ten beats less than among whites. This would seem to accord with the general impression of Indian mentality as stolid, reserved, slow, and steady. But the number of observations is after all rather small; the part of the race represented by them is limited; and the habitat of the group of tribes is mostly a high plateau, and altitude notoriously affects heart action. Considerable corroboration will therefore be needed before any serious conclusions can be built upon this suggestive set of data.

There are other physiological functions that are likely to mean more than the rather gross ones just considered: for instance, the activity of the endocrines or glands of internal secretion. An excess or deficiency of activity of the thyroid, pituitary, adrenals, and sex glands affects not only health, but the type of personality and its emotional and intellectual reactions. For example, cretinism with its accompaniment of near-idiocy is the result of thyroidal under-development or under-functioning, and is often cured by supplying the lack of thyroidal substance and secretion. But this subject is as difficult as it is interesting; to date, absolutely nothing is known about endocrine race differences. It would be a relatively simple matter to secure first-hand information on the anatomy of the endocrine glands in Negroes as compared with whites; to ascertain whether these differed normally in size, weight, shape, or structure, and how. But this knowledge has scarcely been attempted systematically, and still less is any knowledge available in the more delicate and complex field of the workings of the organs. To be sure, theories have been advanced that race differentiation itself may be mainly the result of endocrine differentiations. There is something fascinating about such conjectures, but it is well to remember that they are unmitigated guesses.

38. Disease

Pathology might seem to promise more than normal physiology. So far as mortality goes, there are enormous differences between races. And the mortality is often largely the result of particular diseases. Measles, for instance, has often been a deadly epidemic to uncivilized peoples, and smallpox has in some regions at times taken toll of a quarter of the population in a year or two. Yet it is short-sighted to infer from such cases any racial predisposition or lack of resistance. The peoples in question have been free for generations, perhaps for their entire history, from these diseases, and have therefore not maintained or acquired immunity. Their difference from us is thus essentially in experience, not hereditary or racial. This is confirmed by the fact that after a generation or two the same epidemics that at first were so deadly to Polynesians or American Indians sink to almost the same level of mild virulence as they show among ourselves.

Then, too, immediate environment plays a part. The savage often has no idea of contagion, and still less of guarding against it; he thinks in terms of magic instead of physiology—and succumbs. How far heavy mortality is the result of lack of resistance or of fundamentally vicious treatment, is often hard to say. If we tried to cure smallpox by subjecting patients to a steam-bath and then having them plunge into a wintry river, we should perhaps look upon the disease as a very nearly fatal one to the Caucasian race.

39. Causes of Cancer Incidence

It may be worth while to consider briefly the facts as to mortality from cancer. This dread disease appears to be not contagious, so that the factor of acquired immunity is eliminated. It is regarded as incurable, except by operation, so that differences in treatment become relatively unimportant. If therefore significant differences in racial liability to cancer exist, they should emerge with unusual clearness and certainty.

At first sight they seem to. It has been alleged that the white race is the most susceptible to this affliction. The supporting figures are as follows: cancer deaths per year per 100,000 population.

It would seem from these figures that Caucasians die more frequently of cancer than members of the darker races. In fact, this has been asserted. Let us however continue with figures.

This table would make cancer mortality largely a function of geographical latitude, instead of race.

Another factor enters: occupation. The following data give the death rate per 100,000 population among males of 45-54 in England and Wales.

That the relative incidence is more than a temporary accident is shown by the approximate recurrence of the frequencies after ten years.

In proportion as latitude and occupation influence the occurrence of cancer, race is diminished as a cause. It is reduced still further by other considerations. The rate for Austria in 1906-10 was 78, for Hungary 44. Here the race is the same: the difference must be social. Austria averaged higher in wealth, education, medical development. This fact would tend to have a double effect. First, among the more backward population, a certain proportion would die of internal cancers difficult to diagnose, without the cause being recognized, owing to insufficient medical treatment. Second, the general death rate would be higher. More children and young people would die of infectious or preventable disease, leaving fewer survivors to die of cancer in middle and old age. Wherever, on the other hand, a public is medically educated, and typhoid, smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis claim fewer victims, the proportion of those dying of cancer, nephritis, heart diseases, increases. Such an increase is noted everywhere, and goes hand in hand with a longer average life. The alarm sometimes felt at the modern “increase” of cancer is therefore unfounded, because it is perhaps mainly apparent. If a larger percentage of the population each year died of old age, it would be a sign that sanitation and medicine were increasingly effective: evidence that more people lived to become old, not that age debility was spreading.

Consequently, a high degree of modern civilization must tend to raise the cancer rate; and any group of people will seem relatively immune from cancer in proportion as they remain removed from attaining to this civilization. In Hungary, from 1901-04, the cancer deaths were 239 among the owners of large farms, 41 among the owners of small farms; 108 among employing blacksmiths, 25 among their employees; 114 among employing tailors, 32 among employed tailors. Obviously these pairs of groups differ chiefly in their economic and cultural status.

Here too lies the explanation of why the South African negro shows a rate of only 14, the United States negro of 56; also why the Chinese rate is as low as 5 in Hongkong, rises to 19 in Manila, and 26 in Hawaii, while the closely allied Japanese average 62 for the whole of Japan—as compared with 50 for Spain, which is pure Caucasian, but one of the most backward countries in Europe. In Tokyo and Kyoto the rate soars to 73 and 90 respectively, just as in the United States it is about 10 higher for the urban than for the rural population.

Within the United States, also, the rate rises and falls almost parallel for whites and Negroes according to locality; as,

If allowance is made for the facts that the negro population of the United States is poorer and less educated than the white; that it lives mainly in lower latitudes; and that it tends to be rural rather than urban, the comparative cancer death rates for the country of negro 56 and white 77 would appear to be accounted for, without bringing race into consideration.

In short, what at first glance, or to a partisan pleader, would seem to be a notable race difference in cancer liability, turns out so overwhelmingly due to environmental and social causes as to leave it doubtful whether racial heredity enters as a factor at all. This is not an assertion that race has nothing whatever to do with the disease; it is an assertion that in the present state of knowledge an inherent or permanent connection between race and cancer incidence has not been demonstrated. If there is such a connection, it is evidently a slight one, heavily overlaid by non-racial influences; and it may be wholly lacking.

The case would be still less certain for most other diseases, in which environmental factors are more directly and obviously influential. Racial medical science is not impossible; in fact it should have an important future as a study; but its foundations are not yet laid.