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74-697: The term was originally used in contrast to the other two proposed divisions of mankind based on the story of Noah: Semites and Japhetites . The appellation Hamitic was applied to the Berber , Cushitic , and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family, which, together with the Semitic branch, was formerly labelled "Hamito-Semitic". Because the three Hamitic branches have not been shown to form an exclusive ( monophyletic ) phylogenetic unit of their own, separate from other Afroasiatic languages, linguists no longer use

148-646: A dolichocephalic to mesocephalic cranial index. According to Ashley Montagu "Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity." In the African Great Lakes region, Europeans based the various migration theories of Hamitic provenance in part on the long-held oral traditions of local populations such as the Tutsi and Hima (Bahima, Wahuma or Mhuma). These groups asserted that their founders were "white" migrants from

222-511: A barbaric "jungle life". Afrocentric writers considered the Hamitic hypothesis to be divisive since it asserted the inferiority of "Negroid" peoples. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) thus argued that "the term Hamite under which millions of Negroes have been characteristically transferred to the white race by some eager scientists" was a tool to create "false writing on Africa". According to Du Bois, " Livingstone , Stanley , and others were struck with

296-667: A child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test." 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. 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

370-524: A circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular. Anthropologists of the 19th century such as Ernest Renan readily aligned linguistic groupings with ethnicity and culture, appealing to anecdote, science and folklore in their efforts to define racial character. Moritz Steinschneider , in his periodical of Jewish letters Hamaskir (3 (Berlin 1860), 16), discusses an article by Heymann Steinthal criticising Renan's article "New Considerations on

444-773: A critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state." He thought 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 publicly 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 ,

518-438: A prominent supporter of white supremacy , he went much further, helping Putnam "hone his arguments against integration". 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 (1963) argued that Coon's theory on the speciation of Congoids and other Homo sapiens

592-479: A zoologist can recognise the character of an animal species or variety belonging to any region of the globe or any period of time, so also should an anthropologist if he follows the same method of investigating the morphological characters of the skull[...] This method has guided me in my investigations into the present problem and has given me unexpected results which were often afterwards confirmed by archaeology or history." The Hamitic hypothesis reached its apogee in

666-453: Is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category. The concept of dividing humans into three races called Caucasoid , Mongoloid , and Negroid (originally named "Ethiopian") was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history and further developed by Western scholars in the context of " racist ideologies " during the age of colonialism . With

740-538: Is now largely unused outside the grouping " Semitic languages " in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history , this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem ( Hebrew : שֵׁם ), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis , together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites . In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples . The use of

814-448: Is the Hamitic, which is Negroid rather than Negro. This is the division of African peoples to which the modern Somali and Gala belong, and of which the basis of the population of ancient Egypt consisted... Rather it would seem as though ancient Egypt traded and communicated directly with what is now Abyssinia and the Land of Punt (Somaliland), and that the Hamitic peoples of these countries facing

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888-752: Is to be seen in the Masai [sic], the other in the Baganda, while an even more striking result is offered by the symbiosis of the Bahima of Ankole and the Bahiru [sic]. In his work The Uganda Protectorate (1902, Harry Johnston claims that the Hamites are "Negroid rather than Negro" and that Negroes learned "all the civilization they possessed |before the coming of the white man" from the Hamites: The fifth and last amongst these main stocks

962-690: The Ancient Egyptians . According to the Hamitic theory , this "Hamitic race" was superior to or more advanced than the " Negroid " populations of Sub-Saharan Africa . In its most extreme form, in the writings of C. G. Seligman , this theory asserted that virtually all significant achievements in African history were the work of "Hamites". Since the 1960s, the Hamitic hypothesis and Hamitic theory, along with other theories of "race science" , have been discredited in science. The term Hamitic originally referred to

1036-572: The Eastern Hamites (or Ethiopids , comprising Ancient and Modern Egyptians (but not the Arabs in Egypt), Nubians , Beja , Abyssinians, Galla, Danakil, Somalis , Masai, Bahima and Watusi ). According to Coon, typical Hamitic physical traits included narrow facial features; an orthognathous visage; light brown to dark brown skin tone; wavy, curly or straight hair; thick to thin lips without eversion; and

1110-887: The Egyptians , Cush the Cushites, and Phut the Libyans . During the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians considered Ham to be the ancestor of all Africans. Noah's curse on Canaan as described in Genesis began to be interpreted by some theologians as having caused visible racial characteristics in all of Ham's offspring, notably black skin. In a passage unrelated to the curse on Canaan, the sixth-century Babylonian Talmud says that Ham and his descendants were cursed with black skin, which modern scholars have interpreted as an etiological myth for skin color. Later, Western and Islamic traders and slave owners used

1184-809: The Horn of Africa had mixed with local "Negro" women to produce several hybrid "Hamiticised Negro" populations. The "Hamiticised Negroes" were divided into three groups according to language and degree of Hamitic influence: the "Negro-Hamites" or "Half-Hamites" (such as the Maasai , Nandi and Turkana ), the Nilotes (such as the Shilluk and Nuer ), and the Bantus (such as the Hima and Tutsi ). Seligman would explain this Hamitic influence through both demic diffusion and cultural transmission: At first

1258-618: 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

1332-426: 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 ". The justification for racist Jim Crow laws was provided by pseudo-scientific opinions on "negro" psychology like those expressed by

1406-704: The 1960s. Hamitic hypotheses operated in West Africa as well, and they changed greatly over time. With the demise of the concept of Hamitic languages, the notion of a definable "Hamite" racial and linguistic entity was heavily criticised. In 1974, writing about the African Great Lakes region, Christopher Ehret described the Hamitic hypothesis as the view that "almost everything more un-'primitive', sophisticated or more elaborate in East Africa [was] brought by culturally and politically dominant Hamites, immigrants from

1480-576: The Egyptian features of many of the tribes of Africa, and this is true of many of the peoples between Central Africa and Egypt, so that some students have tried to invent a 'Hamitic' race to account for them—an entirely unnecessary hypothesis." Semites Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East , including Arabs , Jews , Akkadians , and Phoenicians . The terminology

1554-543: The Empire of Kitara in the African Great Lakes region may have been established by a Hamitic founding dynasty. These ideas, under the rubric of science, provided the basis for some Europeans asserting that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu . In spite of both groups being Bantu -speaking, Speke thought that the Tutsi had experienced some "Hamitic" influence, partly based on their facial features being comparatively more narrow than those of

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1628-730: The General Character of the Semitic Peoples, In Particular Their Tendency to Monotheism". Renan had acknowledged the importance of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Israel etc. but called the Semitic races inferior to the Aryan for their monotheism , which he held to arise from their supposed lustful, violent, unscrupulous and selfish racial instincts. Steinthal summed up these predispositions as "Semitism", and so Steinschneider characterised Renan's ideas as "anti-Semitic prejudice". In 1879,

1702-603: The German journalist Wilhelm Marr began the politicisation of the term by speaking of a struggle between Jews and Germans in a pamphlet called Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum ("The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism"). He accused the Jews of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879, Marr's adherents founded the "League for Anti-Semitism", which concerned itself entirely with anti-Jewish political action. Objections to

1776-502: The Hamites, or at least their aristocracy, would endeavour to marry Hamitic women, but it cannot have been long before a series of peoples combining Negro and Hamitic blood arose; these, superior to the pure Negro, would be regarded as inferior to the next incoming wave of Hamites and be pushed further inland to play the part of an incoming aristocracy vis-a-vis the Negroes on whom they impinged... The end result of one series of such combinations

1850-580: The Hamitic race into the black race, and the resemblance it draws between the different branches of black forms in Asia and Africa." In response, historians published in the Journal of Negro History stressed the cross-fertilization of cultures between Africa and Europe: for instance, George Wells Parker adopted Sergi's view that the "civilizing" race had originated in Africa itself. Similarly, black pride groups appropriated

1924-495: The Hutu. Later writers followed Speke in arguing that the Tutsis had originally migrated into the lacustrine region as pastoralists and had established themselves as the dominant group, having lost their language as they assimilated to Bantu culture. Seligman and other early scholars believed that, in the African Great Lakes and parts of Central Africa, invading Hamites from North Africa and

1998-491: The North into East Africa, who were at least part Caucasoid in physical ancestry". He called this a "monothematic" model, which was "romantic, but unlikely" and "[had] been all but discarded, and rightly so". He further argued that there were a "multiplicity and variety" of contacts and influences passing between various peoples in Africa over time, something that he suggested the "one-directional" Hamitic model obscured. Sergi outlined

2072-466: The Portuguese and Spanish word negro ( black ) from Latin nigrum , 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. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , a scholar at the then modern Göttingen University developed a concept dividing mankind into five races in

2146-544: The Red Sea and Indian Ocean carried a small measure of Egyptian culture into the lands about the Nile Lakes. In this way, and through Uganda as a half-way house, the totally savage Negro received his knowledge of smelting and working iron, all his domestic animals and cultivated plants (except those, of course, subsequently introduced by Arabs from Asia and Portuguese from America), all his musical instruments higher in development than

2220-556: The Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European , Northwest Caucasian , and Kartvelian -speaking peoples. Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies , the term also came to be applied to the religions ( ancient Semitic and Abrahamic ) and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution. The terms "anti-Semite" or "antisemitism" came by

2294-586: 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. Darwin 's landmark work On the Origin of Species , published in 1859, eight years after Morton's death, significantly changed scientific discourse on

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2368-403: 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

2442-558: The anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi argued that the Mediterranean race had likely originated from a common ancestral stock that evolved in the Sahara region in Africa, and which later spread from there to populate North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the circum-Mediterranean region. According to Sergi, the Hamites themselves constituted a Mediterranean variety, and one situated close to the cradle of

2516-563: The appellation Hamitic to denote the languages which are now seen as belonging to the Berber , Cushitic and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic family. "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". Through craniometry conducted on thousands of human skulls, Samuel George Morton argued that

2590-399: 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. Upon 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

2664-459: 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

2738-677: The concept of Hamitic identity for their own purposes. Parker founded the Hamitic League of the World in 1917 to "inspire the Negro with new hopes; to make him openly proud of his race and of its great contributions to the religious development and civilization of mankind." He argued that "fifty years ago one would not have dreamed that science would defend the fact that Asia was the home of the black races as well as Africa, yet it has done just that thing." Timothy Drew and Elijah Muhammad developed from this

2812-598: The concept of the "Asiatic Blackman." Many other authors followed the argument that civilization had originated in Hamitic Ethiopia, a view that became intermingled with biblical imagery. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) (1920) believed that Ethiopians were the "mother race". The Nation of Islam asserted that the superior black race originated with the lost tribe of Shabazz , which originally possessed "fine features and straight hair", but which migrated into Central Africa, lost its religion, and declined into

2886-484: The concept of the "Curse of Ham" to justify the enslaving of Africans. 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 or cursed. In consequence, some 19th century theologians emphasized that the biblical Noah restricted his curse to

2960-606: The constituent Hamitic physical types, which would form the basis for the work of later writers such as Carleton Coon and C. G. Seligman. In his book The Mediterranean Race (1901), he wrote that there was a distinct Hamitic ancestral stock, which could be divided into two subgroups: the Western Hamites (or Northern Hamites , comprising the Berbers of the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Sahara, Tibbu, Fula, and extinct Guanches ), and

3034-432: 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: "[T]he answer to the question whether races exist in humans

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3108-645: 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 his Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), Morton analyzed over a hundred intact crania gathered from the Nile Valley, and concluded that the ancient Egyptians were racially akin to Europeans. His conclusions would establish the foundation for the American School of anthropology, and would also influence proponents of polygenism . In his influential The Mediterranean Race (1901),

3182-419: 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

3256-453: The enslavement of Africans. 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", thus separating the high civilization of Ancient Egypt from what they wanted to see as an inferior race. Authors such as W. G. Browne , whose Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria

3330-484: The entry for "Negro" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1910–1911): "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white   ... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts.   ... the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of

3404-497: The indigenous populations of sub-Saharan Africa: the Capoid race in the south, and the Congoid race . In 1982, he used Negroid and Congoid as synonyms. 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

3478-402: 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". The development of Western race theories took place in a historical situation where most Western nations were still profiting from

3552-516: The link between "civilized" North Africa and "primitive" central Africa. Describing the Ugandan Kingdom of Buganda , he argued that its "barbaric civilization" had arisen from a nomadic pastoralist race who had migrated from the north and was related to the Hamitic Oromo (Galla) of Ethiopia. In his Theory of Conquest of Inferior by Superior Races (1863), Speke would also attempt to outline how

3626-745: The north (interpreted as the Horn of Africa and/or North Africa), who subsequently "lost" their original language, culture, and much of their physiognomy as they intermarried with the local Bantus . Explorer J.H. Speke recorded one such account from a Wahuma governor in his book, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile . According to Augustus Henry Keane , the Hima King Mutesa I also claimed Oromo (Galla) ancestors and still reportedly spoke an Oromo idiom, though that language had long since died out elsewhere in

3700-580: The nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure of premaxillary sutures , less hairy, longer eyelashes, [and] 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 (1,700 cubic centimeters cranial capacity compared to 1,400 cubic centimeters in modern-day humans), and

3774-468: The offspring of Ham's youngest son Canaan, while Ham's son Mizraim , the ancestor of the Egyptians, was not cursed. Following the Age of Enlightenment , many Western scholars were no longer satisfied with the biblical account of the early history of mankind, but started to develop faith-independent theories. These theories were developed in a historical situation where most Western nations were still profiting from

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3848-581: The origin of humans. British biologist Thomas Huxley , a strong advocate of Darwinism and a monogenist, counted ten "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

3922-547: The peoples said to be descended from Ham , one of the Sons of Noah according to the Bible . According to the Book of Genesis , after Noah became drunk and Ham dishonored his father, upon awakening Noah pronounced a curse on Ham's youngest son, Canaan , stating that his offspring would be the "servants of servants". Of Ham's four sons, Canaan fathered the Canaanites , while Mizraim fathered

3996-596: The present day by the Beja and Somali... The incoming Hamites were pastoral Caucasians – arriving wave after wave – better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes." Seligman asserted that the Negro race was essentially static and agricultural, and that the wandering "pastoral Hamitic" had introduced most of the advanced features found in central African cultures, including metal working, irrigation and complex social structures. Despite criticism, Seligman kept his thesis unchanged in new editions of his book into

4070-449: The projection of their mouth was less than in other Negroids. He believed the Boskopoids were the ancestors of the Khoisan . 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. Black Anthropologist W. Montague Cobb joined the debate in

4144-522: The region. The missionary R. W. Felkin , who had met the ruler, remarked that Mutesa "had lost the pure Hamitic features through admixture of Negro blood, but still retained sufficient characteristics to prevent all doubt as to his origin". Thus, Keane would suggest that the original Hamitic migrants to the Great Lakes had "gradually blended with the aborigines in a new and superior nationality of Bantu speech ". Speke believed that his explorations uncovered

4218-523: The revised 1795 edition of his De generis humani varietate nativa ( On the Natural Variety of Mankind ). 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

4292-572: The rise of modern genetics , the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations." Negroid has Portuguese or Spanish and Ancient Greek etymological roots. It literally translates as "black resemblance" from

4366-865: The same year, pointing 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." Today, suggestions of biological differences in athletic ability between racial groups are considered unscientific. The Oxford Dictionary of English states: "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." 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: "[T]he native peoples with

4440-493: The single bowstring and the resonant hollow log, and, in short, all the civilization he possessed before the coming of the white man" European colonial powers in Africa were influenced by the Hamitic hypothesis in their policies during the twentieth century. For instance, in Rwanda, German and Belgian officials in the colonial period displayed preferential attitudes toward the Tutsis over the Hutu. Some scholars argued that this bias

4514-472: The stock. He added that the Mediterranean race "in its external characters is a brown human variety, neither white nor negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or negroid peoples." Sergi explained this taxonomy as inspired by an understanding of "the morphology of the skull as revealing those internal physical characters of human stocks which remain constant through long ages and at far remote spots[...] As

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4588-402: The superiority of the white Nordic race . The latter "Nordic" concept was promoted by certain writers, such as eugenicist Madison Grant . According to Yaacov Shavit, this generated "radical Afrocentric theory, which followed the path of European racial doctrines". Writers who insisted that the Nordics were the purest representatives of the Aryan race indirectly encouraged "the transformation of

4662-451: The term as a racial category is considered obsolete. The term Semitic in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen school of history in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen school of history coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of Carleton S. Coon included

4736-407: The term in this sense. Each of these branches is instead now regarded as an independent subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic family. Beginning in the late 19th century, scholars generally classified the Hamitic race as a subgroup of the Caucasian race , alongside the Aryan race and the Semitic – thus grouping the non-Semitic populations native to North Africa and the Horn of Africa , including

4810-549: The turn of the millennium described "Negroid" skulls as having 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 ( prognathism ); a rectangular-shaped palate ; a square or rectangular eye orbit shape; a large interorbital distance; a more undulating supraorbital ridge ; and large teeth. Ashley Montagu lists " neotenous structural traits in which   ... Negroids [generally] differ from Caucasoids   ... flattish nose, flat root of

4884-485: The usage of the term, such as the obsolete nature of the term "Semitic" as a racial term, have been raised since at least the 1930s. Negroid Negroid (less commonly called Congoid ) is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia ( Negritos ). The term

4958-452: The woolly or the frizzly type; a greater or less tendency to prognathism ; eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea ; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth". The Encyclopædia Britannica sees a tendency towards a "tall stature" and " dolichocephaly " (long-headedness), with the exception of the Negritos who are described as showing "short stature" and " brachycephaly " (short-headedness). Forensic anthropologists writing around

5032-455: The work of C. G. Seligman , who argued in his book The Races of Africa (1930) that: Apart from relatively late Semitic influence... the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history is the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushmen , whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at

5106-431: 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". As historian Edith Sanders writes, "Perhaps because slavery

5180-409: Was a significant factor that contributed to the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. African-American scholars were initially ambivalent about the Hamitic hypothesis. Because Sergi's theory proposed that the superior Mediterranean race had originated in Africa, some African-American writers believed that they could appropriate the Hamitic hypothesis to challenge Nordicist claims about

5254-426: 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 (1844), 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

5328-495: Was obsolete by the 1960s, but was controversially revived by Diop in his work, "The African Origin of Civilizations" in 1974 and republished in 1989. The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition (1910–1911), lists the following "well-defined characteristics" of the "Negroid" populations of Africa, southern India , Malaysia , and Australasia : "A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark, tightly curled hair, flat in traverse section, of

5402-402: Was published in 1799, laid the "seeds for the new Hamitic myth that was to emerge in the very near future", insisting that the Egyptians were white. In the mid-19th century, the term Hamitic acquired a new anthropological meaning, as scholars asserted that they could discern a "Hamitic race" that was distinct from the " Negroid " populations of Sub-Saharan Africa . Richard Lepsius would coin

5476-734: Was unlikely because the transmutation of one species to another was a markedly gradual process. 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 (1921). The identification

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