Word: coons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since its publication last fall, Carleton Coon's Origin of Races has been the subject of bitter, continuous attack. His critics have called him a racist, hinted that he was probably a Nazi, and have denounced his work as a return to obsolete, misleading anthropological techniques...
...conflicting views of the critics indicate disagreement on Coon's interpretation of the fossil material, and also the depth of the emotional response of any individual, even of an objective scientist, to a book of this kind...
...Coon considers the historical origins of racial differentiation, and also the problem of the adaptive significance of modern racial differences. In both cases his findings are stimulating, but unconvincing. He presents good evidence for the adaptive value of some racial differences; for instance, skin pigmentation decreases the amount of vitamin D produced in the body by sunlight, and this seems important for Negroid peoples living in areas of maximum solar radiation...
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...