Negroid


Negroid is a historical grouping of human beings, once purported to be an identifiable race and applied as a political class by another dominant 'non-negroid' culture. The term had been used by forensic and physical anthropologists to refer to individuals and populations that share certain morphological and skeletal traits that are frequent among populations in most of Sub-Saharan Africa and isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia. Within Africa, a racial dividing line separating Caucasoid physical types from Negroid physical types was held to have existed, with Negroid groups forming most of the population south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast.
First introduced in the early racial science and anthropometry of the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, Negroid denoted one of the three purported major races of humankind. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete.

Etymology

Negroid has both Spanish and Ancient Greek etymological roots. It literally translates as "black resemblance" from the Spanish word negro, and Greek οειδές -oeidēs, equivalent to -o- + είδες -eidēs "having the appearance of", derivative of είδος eîdos "appearance". The earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" came in 1859. In modern usage, it is associated with populations that on the whole possess the suite of typical Negro physical characteristics.

History of the concept

Origins

, a scholar at the then modern Göttingen University developed a concept dividing mankind into five races in the revised 1795 edition of his De generis humani varietate nativa. Although Blumenbach's concept later gave rise to scientific racism, his arguments were basically anti-racist, since he underlined that mankind as a whole forms one single species, and points out that the transition from one race to another is so gradual that the distinctions between the races presented by him are "very arbitrary". Blumenbach counts the inhabitants of North Africa among the "Caucasian race", grouping the other Africans as "Ethiopian race". In this context, he names the "Abyssinians" and "Moors" as peoples through which the "Ethiopian race" gradually "flows together" with the "Caucasian race".

In the context of scientific racism

Before Darwin

The development of Western race theories took place in a historical situation where most Western nations were still profiting from the enslavement of Africans and therefore had an economical interest in portraying the inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa as an inferior race. A significant change in Western views on Africans came about when Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt drew attention to the impressive achievements of Ancient Egypt, which could hardly be reconciled with the theory of Africans being inferior. In this context, many of the works published on Egypt after Napoleon's expedition "seemed to have had as their main purpose an attempt to prove in some way that the Egyptians were not Negroes", but belonged to a "Hamitic race", which was seen as a subgroup of the "Caucasian race". Thus the high civilization of Ancient Egypt could be separated from the allegedly inferior African "race".
"Perhaps because slavery was both still legal and profitable in the United States... there arose an American school of anthropology which attempted to prove scientifically that the Egyptian was a Caucasian, far removed from the inferior Negro". In his Crania Aegyptiaca, Samuel George Morton, the founder of anthropology in the United States, analyzed over a hundred intact crania gathered from the Nile Valley, and concluded that the ancient Egyptians were racially akin to Europeans.
Discussions on race among Western scholars during the 19th century took place against the background of the debate between monogenists and polygenists, the former arguing for a single origin of all mankind, the latter holding that each human race had a specific origin. Monogenists based their arguments either on a literal interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve or on secular research. Since polygenism stressed the perceived differences, it was popular among white supremacists, especially slaveholders in the US.
Through craniometry conducted on thousands of human skulls, Morton argued that the differences between the races were too broad to have stemmed from a single common ancestor, but were instead consistent with separate racial origins. In Crania Aegyptiaca, he reported his measurements of internal skull capacity grouped according to Blumenbach's five races, finding that the average capacity of the "Caucasian race" was at the top, and that "Ethiopian" skulls had the smallest capacity, with the other "races" ranging in between. He concluded that the "Ethiopian race" was inferior in terms of intelligence. At his death in 1851, when slavery still existed in the southern United States, the influential Charleston Medical Journal praised him with the words: "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race." While a controversy about the correctness of Morton's measurements has been going on since the late 1970s, modern scientists agree that the volume of the skull and intelligence are not related.

In the age of evolutionary biology

's landmark work On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, 8 years after Morton's death, significantly changed scientific discourse on the origin of humans. British biologist Thomas Huxley, a strong advocate of Darwinism and a monogenist, counted 10 "modifications of mankind", dividing the native populations of sub-Saharan Africa into the "Bushmen" of the Cape region and the "Negroes" of the central areas of the continent.
By the end of the 19th century, the influential German encyclopaedia, Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, divided humanity into three major races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, each comprising various sub-races. While the "Hamites" of northern Africa were seen as Caucasoid, "Australians", "Melanesians", and "Negritoes" were seen as Negroid sub-races, although living outside the African continent. The only sub-races attributed to Africa were the "African Negroes" and the "Hottentots".
In 1950, UNESCO published their statement The Race Question. It condemned all forms of racism, naming "the doctrine of inequality of men and races" among the causes of World War II and proposing to replace the term "race" with "ethnic groups" because "serious errors... are habitually committed when the term “race” is used in popular parlance".
American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon published his much debated Origin of Races in 1962. Coon divided the species Homo sapiens into five groups: Besides the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Australoid races, he posited two races among the indigenous populations of sub-Saharan Africa: The Capoid race in the south and the Congoid race. He wrote:
comprises the Negroes and Pygmies of Africa. I have named it Congoid after the region which contains both kinds of people. The term Negroid has been deliberately omitted to avoid confusion. It has been applied both to Africans and the spiral-haired peoples of Southern Asia and Oceania who are not genetically related to each other, as far as we know.

Coon's thesis was that Homo erectus had already been divided into five different races or subspecies. "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 to a more sapient state." He thought that the Caucasoid race had passed the threshold to Homo sapiens about 200,000 years earlier than the Negroid race, thus giving segregationists in the southern US the opportunity to make political use of his thesis in their fight against the Civil rights movement. Although Coon publically assumed a neutral stance regarding segregation, some fellow anthropologists accused him of being racist because of his "clear insensitivity to social issues". In private conversations and correspondence with his cousin Carleton Putnam, a prominent supporter of white supremacy, he went much further, helping Putnam "hone his arguments against integration".
Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerging genetics to classify humans, the debate over Origin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted."
Afrocentrist author Cheikh Anta Diop contrasted "Negroid" with "Cro-Magnoid" in his publications arguing for "Negroid" primacy. Grimaldi Man, Upper Paleolithic fossils found in Italy in 1901, had been classified as Negroid by Boule and Vallois. The identification was obsolete by the 1960s, but was controversially revived by Diop.
Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have cast significant doubt on the idea that race is a meaningful biological category at all. The consensus today among anthropologists is that race is a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one. This view is supported by considerable genetics research.

Physical features

Craniofacial traits

In modern craniofacial anthropometry, Negroid describes features that typify skulls of black people. These include a broad and round nasal cavity; no dam or nasal sill; Quonset hut-shaped nasal bones; notable facial projection in the jaw and mouth area ; a rectangular-shaped palate; a square or rectangular eye orbit shape; a large interorbital distance; a more undulating supraorbital ridge; and large teeth.
According to George W. Gill and other modern forensic anthropologists, physical traits of Negroid crania are generally distinct from those of the Caucasoid and Mongoloid races. They assert that they can identify a Negroid skull with an accuracy of up to 95%. However, Alan H. Goodman cautions that this precision estimate is often based on methodologies using subsets of samples. He also argues that scientists have a professional and ethical duty to avoid such biological analyses since they could potentially have sociopolitical effects. Although widely used in forensic anthropology, some have also challenged the accuracy of craniofacial anthropometry vis-a-vis different human populations that have developed in close proximity to one another and those of mixed ethnic heritage. Since the distinguishing racial traits are not set until puberty, they are also difficult to ascertain in preadolescent skulls.
Variation in craniofacial form between humans has been found to be largely due to differing patterns of biological inheritance. Modern cross-analysis of osteological variables and genome-wide SNPs has identified specific genes, which control this craniofacial development. Of these genes, DCHS2, RUNX2, GLI3, PAX1 and PAX3 were found to determine nasal morphology, whereas EDAR impacts chin protrusion.

Neoteny

lists "neotenous structural traits in which...Negroids differ from Caucasoids... flattish nose, flat root of the nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure of premaxillary sutures, less hairy, longer eyelashes, cruciform pattern of second and third molars". He also suggested that in the extinct Negroid group termed the "Boskopoids", pedomorphic traits proceeded further than in other Negroids. Additionally, Montagu wrote that the Boskopoids had larger brains than modern humans, and the projection of their mouth was less than in other Negroids. He believed that the Boskopoids were the ancestors of the Khoisan.

Hair

A.H.Keane described tightly coiled, kinky hair as an ubiquitous trait among "Negroid" populations. By consequence, he considered the presence of looser, frizzly hair texture in other populations an indication of possible admixture with "Negroid" peoples.
Commenting on the lack of body hair of Negroids and Mongoloids, Carleton S. Coon wrote that "oth negroid and mongoloid skin conditions are to excessive hair development except upon the scalp".

Skin pigmentation

"Negroid" skin pigmentation was described as varying from very dark brown to light brown.
As dark skin is also relatively common in human groups that have historically not been defined as "Negroid", including many populations in both Africa and Asia, it is only when present with other typical Negroid physical traits such as broad facial features, Negroid cranial characteristics, large teeth, prognathism, afro-textured hair and neoteny, that it has been used in Negroid classification. Populations with frequently dark skin yet on the whole lacking the suite of Negroid physical traits were thus usually not regarded as "Negroid", but instead as either "dark Caucasoid" or "Australoid" depending on their other salient physical attributes. By contrast, populations with relatively light skin yet generally possessing typical Negroid physical characteristics, such as the Khoisan, were still regarded as "Negroid".

Athleticism

In the context of prominent successes of African-American athletes like Jesse Owens during the 1936 Summer Olympics, the speed advantage of the "Negroid type of calf, foot and heel bone" was discussed. Today, suggestions of biological differences in athletic ability between racial groups are considered unscientific. Anthropologist W. Montague Cobb pointed out that "there is not a single physical characteristic, including skin color, which all the Negro stars have in common which definitely classify them as Negroes."

Criticism

Since the 1920s, Franz Boas and his school of anthropology at Columbia University were criticising the concept of race as politically dangerous and scientifically useless because of its vague definition.
The term "Negroid" is still used in forensic anthropology. In a medical context, some scholars have recommended that the term Negroid be avoided in scientific writings because of its association with scientific racism.
The Oxford Dictionaries website as of 2018 indicates that "the term Negroid belongs to a set of terms introduced by 19th-century anthropologists attempting to categorize human races such terms are associated with outdated notions of racial types, and so are now potentially offensive and best avoided".
C.S. Coon's evolutionary approach was criticized on the basis that such sorting criteria generally do not produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames. Monatagu argued that Coon's theory on the speciation of Congoids and other Homo sapiens was unlikely because the transmutation of one species to another was a markedly gradual process.

Criticism based on modern genetics

In his 2016 essay Evolution and Notions of Human Race, Alan R. Templeton discusses various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races. His examples for traits traditionally considered to be racial include skin colour: "he native peoples with the darkest skins live in tropical Africa and Melanesia." While those two groups would traditionally be classified as "black", in reality Africans are more closely related to Europeans than to Melanesians. Another example is malarial resistance, which is often found in African populations, but also in "many European and Asian populations".
Templeton concludes: "he answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."