Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“there simply wasn't enough 'morphological space' between
Australo-
pithecus africanus
and
Homo erectus
to shoehorn in a new species.”
60
Gould would later argue for a more “bushlike” hominid lineage, in
harmony with his punctuated equilibrium model of phyletic morphology
and his celebration of evolutionary contingency.
61
In this sense, Gould
was an important transitional figure, being one of the first to clearly
accept the UNESCO redefinition (or abandonment) of race, while also
maintaining that an overly ladderlike phylogeny had straitjacketed
human evolution and underestimated the morphological diversity of
human (and other) lineages. Multilinearity after Gould became accept-
able again, when purged of its earlier racialist overtones.
The liveliness of this issue has to be understood in light of the fact that
even as late as the 1960s, human
racial
diversity was still being routinely
characterized as taxonomically significant by many physical anthropol-
ogists. Carleton Coon at University of Pensylvansia for example, as pres-
ident of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, in 1962
claimed that African
Homo erectus
populations (“Congoids”) had actu-
ally crossed the threshold to fully human
Homo sapiens
two hundred
thousand years later than other hominid populations (Europeans, of
course, led the way). Africa, as he put it, “was only an indifferent kinder-
garten” for humanity. Coon also used this prejudice to work secretly,
behind the scenes, to undermine the
Brown v. Board of Education
civil
rights ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared that separate
was
not
equal and thus mandated desegregation.
62
Franz Weidenreich, a
Jewish émigré anthropologist from Germany, had carried over an implicit
polygenism into U.S. physical and paleoanthropology, the idea being that
humans had diverged into separate racial groups prior to the transition
from
erectus
to
sapiens
. De facto polygeny continued also in Germany:
a 1965 topic edited by the former SS officer Gerhard Heberer, for
instance, included a chart showing racial differentiation beginning at the
end of the Pleistocene, about one million years ago.
63
Molecular Anthropology
The idea of modern humans developing slowly and separately in dif-
ferent parts of the world is today known as multiregionalism; this is
the infamous alternative to what is often called the replacement or
