Science: Coon on Races

Five thousand years ago the Sumerian rulers of Mesopotamia were buried, in big underground chambers, with multitudes of sacrificed servants. The skull and face forms of these old Near Easterners are almost identical with those of living Englishmen. Ancient Egyptian skulls resemble those in 17th-Century London plague pits, in New Stone Age box graves of Switzerland. Science has had much to puzzle over in these resemblances, and many others in the intricately shuffled complex of races, sub-races, types and varieties in Europe's white population.

A scientist eminently well equipped for this study is Carleton Stevens Coon of Harvard, a large, ursine, pleasant-mannered and persevering anthropologist who has spent the past eight years traipsing all over Europe, eastern Asia and northern Africa, photographing and measuring all kinds of people, studying human skeletal material of all ages, and writing a book. This week, while Dr. Coon was vacationing in the Azores with his wife, his book, a richly documented treatise aimed at "the college audience," was published.

Scope of The Races of Europe* is ambitious: "To trace the racial history of the white division of Homo sapiens from its Pleistocene [Glacial Age] beginnings to the present." Dr. Coon believes that the species Homo sapiens—modern man—evolved as early as the middle of the Pleistocene, or even earlier.† The first known white representatives were short men with long heads. Some of them blended with bulky Neanderthaloid types, produced a fairly stable hybrid group. After the Pleistocene's end these hybrids survived in Europe as hunters and fishers. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean area a race of pure Homo sapiens ancestry appeared which learned agriculture and animal husbandry. Some of them moved north and west to blend with the hunters and fishers. Thus the European melting pot was set to boil, and hundreds of further migratory stirrings, major and minor, kept it seething.

A race is a group of people who, for the most part, resemble one another in such things as hair, eye and skin color; stature; facial form; size and shape of head. A national population may be a confusing potpourri of many races and racial blends, and the most typical representatives of one race may be scattered among many nations. A specialist in racial anthropology must track down the basic racial features and distinguish them in their jumbled context.

Dr. Coon points out that in judging racial differences, laymen are likely to be unduly influenced by styles in clothing, hair and beards. He prints a picture of Neanderthal Man as he might look with a haircut, clean shave and modern clothes (see cut, p. 51), showing that he might get by today on the tough side of town without attracting attention as an oddity.

That blending in Europe began early is illustrated by the fact that in Germany more than a half-dozen racial types were mingling before the end of the Stone Age. Nordics are a minority in present-day Germany, for Nordics are characteristically dolichocephalic (longheaded) whereas most Germans are brachycephalic (round-headed). The brachycephalic include Borreby and Alpine types, relatively little changed since the Stone Age, and Binaries, a Mediterranean importation of narrow-nosed roundheads.