Word: coonly
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Essentially, Coon's thesis for the origin of these racial distinctions is simply. Rejecting the conventional concept that races are rather recent--anywhere from several hundred years old to a few tens of thousands of years old--he postulates that racial differentiation took place early along five geographically separate lines. Each of these lines split from a single parent stock, homo erectus, and at different times independently developed into homo sapiens. "Homo erectus, then, evolved into homo sapiens not once but five times, as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal...
...Coon draws three important conclusions from this theory. The first is that man evolved in different parts of the world separately, but along remarkably parallel lines. Many experts consider this unlikely, but it is certainly not impossible, and there are precedents for this kind of marked parallelism in zoological history. The second conclusion is that the differentiation of races took place much earlier than has been previously supposed. In this hypothesis, Coon seems reasonably justified...
...third conclusion is the most controversial. Coon suggests that the different racial lines became home sapiens at different times; thus, all though the Caucasoid stock became sapient relatively early, Negroes passed the threshold recently--perhaps only 50,000 years ago, or as much as 150,000 years later than Caucasoids. Racists have eagerly misinterpreted this as proof of the "primitiveness" of Negroes, although Coon suggests no such thing. Such an interpretation is disastrously false: there has never been any proof of social differences in intelligence, or mental characteristics of any kind, with the exception of certain non-biological, culturally conditioned...
Unfortunately, his thesis lends itself to misinterpretation, and to the non-expert the terms in which the evidence is presented can be misleading. Furthermore, as might be expected in any book of its size, there are certain factual errors. Undoubtedly Coon's insistence on a "racial temperament" would not be upheld by a majority of anthropologists. It is too bad that the errors seem to strengthen the racist argument...
...better or worse, the book solves nothing. The fossils are too fragmentary, and the concepts too confused for a definitive study of races at the present time. Yet Coon's book is an important summary of existing evidence, and his theory is important, stimlating and provoking. Regretably he has, through occasionally imprecise statements, provided material for individends whose feelings are farthest from the scientific, open spirit of the book and its author