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Carleton Stevens Coon, ( 23 June 1904 – 3 June 1981 ) was an American Physical Anthropologist best remembered for his books on Race . BIOGRAPHY Carleton Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to an established Yankee family. He developed an interest in prehistory, and attended Phillips Academy, Andover where he studied Hieroglyph ics and also developed an excellent profiency in ancient Greek . Coon went on to study at Harvard , where he began to study Egyptology with George Reisner . However he, like many students, was swayed to the field of Anthropology by Earnest Hooton and he graduated ''magna cum laude'' in 1925 . Coon continued on in Harvard, making the first of many trips to North Africa in 1925 to conduct fieldwork in the Rif area of Morocco , which was still politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish. He earned his Ph.D. in 1928 and returned to Harvard as a lecturer and later a professor. His work from this period included a 1939 rewrite of William Z. Ripley 's 1899 '' The Races Of Europe ''. Coon was a colorful character who both undertook adventuresome exploits and like his mentor Earnest Hooton he wrote widely for a general audience. He published several novels and fictionalized accounts of his trips to North Africa, including ''The Riffians'', ''Flesh of the Wild Ox'', ''Measuring Ethiopia'', and ''A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent''. This last book was an account of his work during World War II , which involved Espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in German-occupied Morocco under the guise of anthropological fieldwork, a practice generally condemned by working anthropologists today, in the context the 21st century science ethics. In 1948 , Coon left Harvard to take up a position as Professor of Anthropology at the University Of Pennsylvania , which had an excellent museum attached to it. Throughout the 1950s he produced a series of academic papers, as well as many popular books for the general reader, the most notable being ''The Story of Man'' (1954). Coon's own interest was in attempting to use Darwin 's theory of Natural Selection to explain the differing physical characteristics of various racial groups. In ''. Coon continued to write and defend his work. He died on June 3 , 1981 , in Gloucester, Massachusetts . LEGACY Coon's hypothesis that modern Human s, ''Homo sapiens'', arose five separate times from '' Homo Erectus '' in five separate places, "as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more ''sapient'' state", thus providing origins in deep time for his five races of mankind, no longer has wide currency among scholars, and his using this to rank different races struck many commentators of resembling the Scientific Racism of the early twentieth century (one page in Coon's book contrasted a picture of an Australian Aborigine called " Topsy " with a Chinese professor, and was captioned "The Alpha and the Omega"). See Multi-regional Origin for a discussion of theories of this type. Discovery of a possible hybrid ''Homo sapiens X neanderthalensis'' fossil child at the Abrigo Do Lagar Velho rock-shelter site in Portugal in 1999 raised hopes of rehabilitating the Multiregional Hypothesis of which Coon was a proponent. WORKS BY CARLETON S. COON
QUOTES "It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: ''You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village.''" —''The Story of Man'', 1954, page 376 FURTHER READING AND SOURCES
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