Review of The Living Races of Man by Carleton S. Coon, with Edward H. Hunt

It would be difficult to give low marks for a book by the late Carleton Stevens Coon, and the Living Races of Man, published by Alfred Knopf in 1965, is no exception. Coon not only had a distinguished academic pedigree, but he was an explorer and archaeologist in his own right who crisscrossed the globe to study the living and the long dead. Above all, he was a bear for hard work and a productive writer. An obituary in the New York Times referred to him as one of the last great American "general" anthropologists (NYT, obit., 6-6-81). In the present study he also benefited from the assistance of his colleague Edward H. Hunt, actually a specialist in dental research with Harvard credentials.

Background to the Living Races

Coon, as he disclosed in his autobiography, Adventures and Discoveries, had intended Living Races to be Part 2 of a trilogy that had started with The Origin of Races (1962) and would end with a study of race and aptitude (A a D, p. 363). This volume never appeared. Political storm clouds adverse to Coon's work and his very status as a leader in the field were already gathering on the horizon and were strong enough to foster some negative reviews of Origin and incidents of social snubbing from former colleagues in anthropology. For Coon believed in the reality of race and racial differences, but publicly in a benign way.

In the introduction of the Origin, he had advanced the thesis that the different races (or subspecies) of homo sapiens had appeared and entered the sapiens state from separate pre-human homo erectus ancestors at different times, and made a significant inference:

"...that fossil men now extinct were less gifted than their descendants who have larger brains, that the subspecies which crossed the evolutionary threshold into the category of Homo sapiens the earliest have evolved the most, and the obvious correlation between the length of time a subspecies has been in the sapiens state and the levels of civilization attained by some of its populations may be related phenomena (p. ix-x)."

The burden of Origin was the elaborate tracing of the then available skeletal remains based upon his own explorations and the findings of colleagues to unravel the upward drift within particular areas until fully evolved humans could be detected.

Coon identified five races, which he labeled Australoid (Australian aboriginals and close relatives), Mongoloid (Far Eastern-Southeast Asian-American Indian populations), Caucasoid (Europeans-Eastern Mediterraneans-Arabs-some of the peoples of India), Capoid (Bushmen-Hottentots), and Congoid (Negroes-Pygmies). These races could only have developed in large distinct geographical and meteorological regions with natural boundaries that effectively blocked extensive genetic contacts over a long period of time. This phase of relative isolation was essential in the creation of visible differences in appearance, along with other biological traits not necessarily seen by the naked eye. An added point was such that racial physical differences had developed in the "erectus" stage(s) before a fully human condition of each subspecies was achieved. It did not necessarily mean that this "candelabra" of developing races did not have a common base in a very early hominid form.

As Coon had indicated that the time lines for the appearance of fully human races had created distinctions in capacity for civilization, he had to have grasped the significance of this conclusion. The skeletal record of pre-history therefore posed a problem (implicit) for race relations in the United States and some other modern multiracial societies as Coon concluded tentatively, "as far as we know the Congoid line started on the same level as the Eurasiatic ones [encompassing Australoid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid] in the early Middle Pleistocene and then stood still for half a million years, after which Negroes and Pygmies appeared as if out of nowhere (Origin, p. 658)." But calm reflection might yield other conclusions about this deficit in the record, and Coon, as revealed below, would try to come up with other alternatives.

Possible Motivation for Living Races

To emphasize his paramount interest in nonpartisan scholarship, he launched Living Races as a tactical pivot to focus readers' attention on what the latest science of the 20th century had to say about the the racial varieties of mankind as living, breathing specimens; the relationships between (and within) the five races that he had classified previously; and the record of the mixing these races both in late prehistoric times and particularly after the great transoceanic expansions conducted in great measure by European Caucasoids, but not excluding Arabs and other Muslims. The underlying theme was that transitional forms (or "clines") such as those that reflect racial mixture did not annul the logical reality of distinct races as necessary precursors. That is why fair-skinned Caucasoids in the African tropics are prone to suffer from prickly heat, while African Negroes, whose development took place in that area, are much more resistant (pp. 244-45). One cannot disagree with early reviewers who found the book encyclopedic in scope as it covered language families; global differences in climate; the utility of blue eyes in spotting distant objects in dim, foggy light; blood types; facial muscles, nose shapes; blood groups; the occurrence of blond hair among some Australoids; eye sizes; and teeth configurations (for example, pp. 11, 40-44, 70, 150, 209-288; 236; review samples: A a D, pp. 368-70; American Anthropologist/1967, pp. 260-61) .

Coon placed less stress on what one sympathizer (Revilo P. Oliver/Conspiracy or Degeneracy, 1967) had characterized as the finding that "racial differences antedate humanity." However, Coon's pivot is most evident with respect to Caucasoids. He no longer emphasized the elaborate typology for the (trans) European races he had unveiled in The Races of Europe, his youthful updating and revision of William Z, Ripley (same title, 1899), with its East Baltics, Brunns, Borreby's, and Ladogans added to the longer established Alpine-Nordic-Mediterranean trilogy. Instead he described a fundamental unity of most Caucasoids, whether from the European continent or the Levant/Near East; differences in facial morphology and coloration characterizing particular zones being less important, with skin tone--so seized upon by the average person--a function of variations in sunlight and cloud cover over long stretches of time. Skull shapes, he noted, had become rounded or longer at intervals for reasons still inexplicable, but as noted below, there were environmental factors at play. Further, he found that contemporary Turks differ from Greeks essentially in their respective deposits of subcutaneous fat--the Turks being thinner below the surface skin (pp. 39-40). (An amateur reader attuned to these topics might say that in proportional distribution of particular Caucasoid types, Greeks and Turks do differ.)

Selection, Environment, and Culture in America

In this vein, with respect to subsets of Caucasoids, Coon elaborated on the beneficial or at least race-mitigating developments in the New World. Using statistics derived from measurements of U.S. servicemen during the Second World War, he reported that Americans of Italian and Greek descent were taller than their counterparts in Europe. Further, skull shapes of Middle Easterners had changed in the American New World since the practice of flattening the backs of babies' heads by cradling had quickly died out, and the grownups had become more long-headed. Overall, the cephalic index (skull roundness) was dropping in the United States. He conceded that anthropologists had been misled by the prevalence of cradling, a pattern of culture, not genetics, and had therefore exaggerated the prominence of the "Dinaric" type in the Near East . Further, Central and Eastern Europeans, at a more gradual rate, were leaving the brachycephaly of many generations of ancestors as they became taller in the American Commonwealth (v. pp. 304-05).

The reader must keep in mind Coon's view of the impact and interplay of environment and culture: selection over a long period of time in differing climates did create dissimilar races, but could (within particular races) in a shorter spell of a few generations adjust head-form among such groups as Polish-, Czech-, and Hungarian-Americans. The very rapid head-form change among New World Levantines reflected much more the impact of a new culture in which cradling of infants to their mothers served no purpose. Nutrition could be considered environmental and cultural, and Coon held in several works that increased consumption of higher quality food, almost in and of itself, had boosted stature among Caucasoids and other races--and conversely, its absence lowered height.

Although there was a potential togetherness in the America, he found that each of the Caucasoid immigrants during the great migrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries sought out enclaves most reminiscent of the particular areas they left behind: "German can still be heard on the tidy farms in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Swedish in Minnesota, Basque on the open range in Nevada, Armenian on the vine covered hills above Fresno, Portuguese wherever there are boats to sail, and Cockney on the streets of Philadelphia (p. 303)" Aptly, he found that this United States of the early post World War II period was "less a melting pot than a smorgasbord (ibid.)."

Although not really a melting pot, there was no hint that the American experience was "disharmonic"--no evidence adduced that pitted Nordics and assimilable minorities vs. the unassimilables: that would have been a prime thesis of the early 1970's Dispossessed Majority, an anti-egalitarian counter-punch highlighting race differences that Coon endorsed surreptitiously at the time. In retrospect, however, it is interesting that in a footnote specifying three of the "many excellent books" available to informed laymen on the racial composition of the American people, he included Madison Grant's Conquest of a Continent with works by Samuel Elliot Morrison, and M. L. Hanson (accompanied by a disclaimer regarding support for any author's political agenda: v. p 301).

In his excursion into America's interracial history, he discusses Negroid-Caucasoid crossings, and finds that, overall, U.S. Negroes have about 20 percent of the genes of the latter, on average, but that statistics for greater Negro racial purity could be found in the deep South. Based on visible appearance, many American Negroes were lighter than the Negroes of Africa. What percentage of Negroid inheritance Whites had remained unknown. These determinations are not uncommon. Coon, without the benefit of DNA analyses and citing one study from the 1950's expressed skepticism about any significant American Indian heritage in the U.S. Negro population. He considered that there was a greater degree of Negro admixture into the genetics of the former, however, especially in the eastern United States. There were also mixed tri-racial Indian, Negro, White communities, about 200 of them according the best estimates of the time. In the South of the day, their status was "anomalous," while the Federal government classified them as Indians (v. pp. 304-08).

Regarding the American Indians themselves, Coon held to the rather conventional view that they were basically Mongoloids who had migrated across the Bering strait, with sufficient time in the New World to have experienced selection for survival traits in the varying climates of the Americas to foster differences from their remote brethren back across the straits. Thus, some Indians had rather Caucasoid features and prominent or beaked noses, along with less flat facial profiles. That there were some remote early Caucasoid (Neanderthal) genes in the American Indians Coon was willing to consider, but in his time there was no precise dating available to substantiate the claims of those who had located possible prehistoric remains revealing this admixture (p. 131). Of all the living races of man, the Mongoloids were the most able to make adjustments to differing climates as the varieties of Indians in the tropics, plains, and mountains of the Americas demonstrated. Coon was not anxious to postulate the view of "diffusionists," that Europeans had arrived in the New World earlier than Columbus and Cortez in sufficient numbers to have any genetic or cultural impact (pp. 33-34; 152-54). The controversy over the status of Kennewick man was in the future.

Blood and Race

To supplement his findings in previous studies, Coon added blood groups as at least a potential racial classifier. Coon later confessed that he was not fully convinced that such groups were a significant aid in determination of racial families; he found that they were more reliably indicators of resistance to particular diseases and cut across distinct races (v. A a D, pp. 364-65). In fact, this section in Living Races owed its existence almost entirely to his assistant, Dr. Hunt (Ibid.) Nevertheless, both author and collaborator agreed that where the gene for blood group "O" was present, and it was in some Europeans, but even originally more so among American Indians, some protection against syphilis was afforded. Further, this resistance was reinforced by a gene termed "Diego" (Di), which apparently did link Mongoloids to American Indians as their exclusive property. However, this combination was ineffective against smallpox, where groups "A" and "B," present among European Caucasoids, but not Indo-Americans, were helpful, thus resulting in the devastation of Indian tribes, until eventually a surviving remnant of group A arose later among Plains Indians (v. pp. 280-81, 282-83, 287).

Ears, Eyes, and Facial Muscles

Other differences of varying racial significance were ear wax--dry and crumbly among North Asians and increasingly sticky among Europeans and Congoids. There could be no certainty regarding these distinctions; in fact, statistics for Mayan Indians sampled--along with Mestizos--yielded low levels of ear-wax, thus establishing a cleft between North Asians and Indians of the New World. Eyeball sizes, as determined by weight by Japanese and American anthropologists, ranked those of American Negroes as the largest, of American Whites, as second, and those of Japanese as the smallest. The muscles for facial expression were surer demarcations for race: Caucasoids, with Italians as a prime example, had more expressive facial movements for non verbal communication; those for northern Mongoloids, were also well developed, but utilized a different type of musculature. Those of Congoids least, facial expressions being based more on eye and teeth movements (pp. 254-58).

Appended to the text of Living Races is an extensive photo album showing members of the five primary racial groups identified by Coon, as well as mixtures of old and new standing. He began this photo essay with the "Circumpolar Peoples": Laps, Zyrians, Voguls, and Samoyeds, where there is evidence of Caucasoid-Mongoloid crossing, and moving over to Eskimos where the classification is fully Mongoloid. Coon also provides photos of a famous isolate, not far from the circumpolar area, the Ainus (identified in the book as Caucasoid)--who continue to live in Hokkaido and Sakhalin Island. While most of the latter examples would appear affiliated with "trans-Europeans in appearance," it is fair to state that the last one is surely much closer to a contemporary Japanese. Readers will on their own initiative pick up other instances of uncertain category matches. Another reasonable criticism of this otherwise impressive collection is that most of the samples from Europe proper and a bit further east depicting "The Caucasoids, from Ireland to India" had already appeared in The Races of Europe; certainly, from his vast photographic collections, Coon could have come up with newer or at least different portraits.

Coon utilized his photo display to illustrate his thesis regarding a people generally regarded as indigenous to the extreme south of Africa--the Bushmen. Even though he had designated them "Capoids," for the Cape of Good Hope region (southwestern Africa), their present residence, he had long argued that this people had in prehistoric times made their homeland in the north of Africa. They had been displaced, however, by the onrush of West Asian Caucasoids who populated the region all the way from what is now Egypt to most of Morocco. Gradually, the ancestors of the Capoids made their way down through the more watered stretches of the Sahara of pre-antiquity until reaching relative safety in the bottom of the continent, where for some reason they had experienced a loss of height (Origins, pp. 638-39).

Despite their displacement, the ancestral Capoids had mixed sufficiently with early Berbers for some of the latter to show the more Mongoloid eyes and yellowish skin of those who trekked to the Cape, and Coon placed a couple of portraits of Moroccans for substantiation. (v. plates 109c; 114 b). Coon's conclusions differ markedly from those who consider the Capoids the ideal model for an out-of-Africa mother race, which in dispersal throughout the globe developed into the separate races that had drawn on and emphasized their particular traits of non-black complexion, peppercorn hair, and eye shapes anticipating those of Far Easterners. Coon, in fact, proposes "back into Africa" in this case, and since he concentrates on the evolution of three of man's five subspecies in regions outside of Africa, he is not readily associated with this now popular view of Bushmen/Capoids.

Coon was not done with Africa, or the continent with him. He admitted that its racial history was very complex. As if drawing back from his timelines and parts of his racial classification system, he finds that Negroes proper (as distinguished from Pygmies) are "Negroids": they have been a long standing blend of Mediterranean-area Caucasoids and Pygmies. These findings could not be derived from DNA analyses, as they were not yet employed in the profession, but from what he described as a mathematical analysis of "571 modern Negro crania" that revealed gravitation between these two racial poles (v. p.123; pp. 122-125). That is possibly why no clearly identifiable full Negro skull from the Pleistocene era had been found to date. But what of the Pygmies themselves? Coon initially would have the reader accept that they are the Congoids primeval who passed into humanity in the West African rain forests, with the small body builds and loose joints for quick, agile movements needed to survive under a thick tropical canopy. They are the irreducible forest dwellers and spring from no other source. But are they? In the concluding paragraph of a discussion about "The Importance of Being a Pygmy," Coon passes along as at least plausible, an hypothesis of the anthropologist R. Ruggles Gates that Pygmies, once taller, had been driven into the hot, humid forest by drought elsewhere in Africa; in the jungle, a mutation for dwarfing passed throughout the remaining refugees as a successful survival trait (pp. 109-110).

In retrospect, some of the controversy over "Congoids" had been misplaced at the outset, even in the Origins, because Coon was uncertain about where Pygmies came from and how Negroes actually evolved. If the latter were not indeed a distinct race but a composite, then at least in a partial sense they would have been as old as the Caucasoids. In the preface to the portion of his pictorial supplement featuring "The Africans," he had to admit based on his own findings that the "origin of the Pygmies and Negroes is unknown." Both Origins and Living Races would depict the Australoids of Australia rather than Congoids as a distinct race, readily traceable, and related by mixture in some way to certain trans-Pacific peoples. Australian aborigines did not number very many in the United States and did not constitute a large global population group. They were not part of the "American race problem" that preoccupied Coon in more ways than he cared to admit in a public forum.