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153-485: Carleton S. Coon characterized the subgroup as having shorter or medium (not tall) stature, a long ( dolichocephalic ) or moderate ( mesocephalic ) skull, a narrow and often slightly aquiline nose , the prevalence of dark hair and eyes, and frequently darker skin, ranging from cream to tan or dark brown skin tone; olive complexion being especially common and epitomizing the supposed Mediterranean race. Racial differentiations occurred following long-standing claims about

306-646: A cover for an arms-smuggling operation in German-occupied Morocco. He was awarded the Legion of Merit and after the war he retained ties to the military and the OSS' successor the Central Intelligence Agency . He wrote about his wartime experiences in his book, A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent (1980). Coon's early work in physical anthropology , such as The Races of Europe (1939),

459-564: A 1989 article, noted that Coon's research was "still regarded as a valuable source of data". In 2001, John P. Jackson, Jr. researched Coon's papers to review the controversy around the reception of The Origin of Races , stating in the article abstract: Segregationists in the United States used Coon's work as proof that African Americans were "junior" to white Americans, and thus unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines

612-464: A German bishop visiting north Italy during the 12th century, noticed a widespread new form of political and social organization, observing that Italy appeared to have exited from feudalism so that its society was based on merchants and commerce. Linked to this was anti-monarchical thinking, represented in the famous early Renaissance fresco cycle The Allegory of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (painted 1338–1340), whose strong message

765-460: A citizen and official, as well as a theorist and philosopher and also Quintilian . Perhaps the most succinct expression of his perspective on humanism is in a 1465 poetic work La città di vita , but an earlier work, Della vita civile , is more wide-ranging. Composed as a series of dialogues set in a country house in the Mugello countryside outside Florence during the plague of 1430, Palmieri expounds on

918-404: A combination of reasoning and empirical evidence . Humanist education was based on the programme of Studia Humanitatis , the study of five humanities: poetry , grammar , history , moral philosophy , and rhetoric . Although historians have sometimes struggled to define humanism precisely, most have settled on "a middle of the road definition... the movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate

1071-584: A continuous learning from antiquity). Sociologist Rodney Stark , plays down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city-states in the High Middle Ages , which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism . This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and Spain) were absolute monarchies , and others were under direct Church control,

1224-610: A course with Earnest Hooton , inspired by his lectures on the Berbers of the Moroccan Rif . Coon obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1925 and immediately embarked on graduate studies in anthropology. He conducted his dissertation fieldwork in the Rif in 1925, which was politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish, and was awarded his PhD in 1928. Coon

1377-568: A cultural rebirth at the close of the Middle Ages and rise of the Modern world. One of the distinguishing features of Renaissance art was its development of highly realistic linear perspective. Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) is credited with first treating a painting as a window into space, but it was not until the demonstrations of architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and the subsequent writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) that perspective

1530-538: A faster propagation of more widely distributed ideas. In the first period of the Italian Renaissance , humanists favored the study of humanities over natural philosophy or applied mathematics , and their reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Writing around 1450, Nicholas of Cusa anticipated the heliocentric worldview of Copernicus , but in

1683-510: A lawyer, writing: "Why have you done this? When are you going to stop?" Washburn was a fellow student of Earnest Hooton at Harvard, and Coon saw his subsequent repudiation of biological race as an "oedipal" betrayal of their mentor. Garn, Coon's former student and coauthor of Races , helped draft the AAPA motion condemning Putnam, which also disappointed Coon. Coon stopped referencing Montagu and then Washburn in his work after they each publicly rejected

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1836-406: A long and complex historiography , and in line with general skepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual cultural heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. Some observers have questioned whether the Renaissance

1989-489: A love of books. In some cases, cultivated library builders were also committed to offering others the opportunity to use their collections. Prominent aristocrats and princes of the Church created great libraries for the use of their courts, called "court libraries", and were housed in lavishly designed monumental buildings decorated with ornate woodwork, and the walls adorned with frescoes (Murray, Stuart A.P.). Renaissance art marks

2142-551: A medium skin-tone, in contrast to pale northerners. By the 19th century, long-standing cultural and religious differences between Protestant northwestern Europe and the Catholic south were being reinterpreted in racial terms. In the 19th century, the division of humanity into distinct races became a matter for scientific debate. In 1870, Thomas Huxley argued that there were four basic racial categories ( Xanthochroic , Mongoloid , Australioid and Negroid ). The Xanthochroic race were

2295-532: A more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform . It saw myriad artistic developments and contributions from such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo , who inspired the term "Renaissance man". In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning . The period also saw revolutions in other intellectual and social scientific pursuits, as well as

2448-432: A perfect mind and body, which could be attained with education. The purpose of humanism was to create a universal man whose person combined intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable of functioning honorably in virtually any situation. This ideology was referred to as the uomo universale , an ancient Greco-Roman ideal. Education during the Renaissance was mainly composed of ancient literature and history as it

2601-403: A philosophical fashion. Science and art were intermingled in the early Renaissance, with polymath artists such as Leonardo da Vinci making observational drawings of anatomy and nature. Leonardo set up controlled experiments in water flow, medical dissection, and systematic study of movement and aerodynamics, and he devised principles of research method that led Fritjof Capra to classify him as

2754-459: A sequel, so the two would jointly fulfill the goals of the original project. (He indeed published The Living Races of Man in 1965.) The book asserted that the human species divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens . Further, he suggested that the races evolved into Homo sapiens at different times. It was not well received. The field of anthropology was moving rapidly from theories of race typology, and The Origin of Races

2907-673: A series of archaeological excavations of Stone Age cave sites in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. These included Bisitun Cave , where he discovered traces of the Neanderthals , and Hotu cave , which he claimed showed evidence of early agriculture , though subsequent excavations proved this false. He was also a lifelong proponent of the existence of cryptid 'Wild Men' such as the Sasquatch and Yeti , which he believed were relict populations of human-like apes that, when found, would support his theory of

3060-513: A series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith, and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; combined with the introduction of the printing press , this allowed many more people access to books, especially the Bible. In all, the Renaissance can be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve

3213-520: A wall in the form of pilasters. One of the first buildings to use pilasters as an integrated system was in the Old Sacristy (1421–1440) by Brunelleschi. Arches, semi-circular or (in the Mannerist style) segmental, are often used in arcades, supported on piers or columns with capitals. There may be a section of entablature between the capital and the springing of the arch. Alberti was one of the first to use

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3366-459: A wide range of writers. Classical texts could be found alongside humanist writings. These informal associations of intellectuals profoundly influenced Renaissance culture. An essential tool of Renaissance librarianship was the catalog that listed, described, and classified a library's books. Some of the richest "bibliophiles" built libraries as temples to books and knowledge. A number of libraries appeared as manifestations of immense wealth joined with

3519-540: Is 1401, when the rival geniuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral (Ghiberti won). Others see more general competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello , and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why

3672-479: Is a period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity . Associated with great social change in most fields and disciplines, including art , architecture , politics, literature , exploration and science ,

3825-569: Is about the virtues of fairness, justice, republicanism and good administration. Holding both Church and Empire at bay, these city republics were devoted to notions of liberty. Skinner reports that there were many defences of liberty such as the Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) celebration of Florentine genius not only in art, sculpture and architecture, but "the remarkable efflorescence of moral, social and political philosophy that occurred in Florence at

3978-621: Is exhibited by many Irishmen, Welshmen and Bretons, by Spaniards, South Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and high-caste Brahmins … I am much disposed to think that the Melanochroi are the result of an intermixture between the Xanthochroi and the Australoids. It is to the Xanthochroi and Melanochroi, taken together, that the absurd denomination of "Caucasian" is usually applied. By the late 19th century, Huxley's Xanthochroi group had been redefined as

4131-608: Is responsible for by far the greater part of Mediterranean civilization, certainly before 1000 B.C. (and probably much later), and so shaped not only the Aegean cultures, but those of Western as well as the greater part of Eastern Mediterranean lands, while the culture of their near relatives, the Hamitic pre-dynastic Egyptians , formed the basis of that of Egypt." In the U.S., the idea that the Mediterranean race included certain populations on

4284-535: Is that the devastation in Florence caused by the Black Death , which hit Europe between 1348 and 1350, resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th century Italy. Italy was particularly badly hit by the plague, and it has been speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife . It has also been argued that

4437-573: The "Nordic" race , whereas his Melanochroi became the Mediterranean race. As such, Huxley's Melanochroi eventually also comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the Hamites (e.g. Berbers, Somalis, northern Sudanese, ancient Egyptians) and Moors . William Z. Ripley 's The Races of Europe (1899) created a tripartite model, which was later popularised by Madison Grant . It divided Europeans into three main subcategories: Teutonic , Alpine and Mediterranean. Ripley noted that although

4590-482: The American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) passed a resolution condemning it. Coon, who had corresponded with Putnam about the book as he was writing it, and chaired the meeting of the AAPA in which the resolution was passed, resigned in protest, criticizing the resolution as scientifically irresponsible and a violation of free speech. Later, he claimed to have asked how many of those present at

4743-717: The Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries), Ottonian Renaissance (10th and 11th century), and the Renaissance of the 12th century . The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period . Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in art , architecture , philosophy , literature , music , science , technology , politics, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed

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4896-808: The High Middle Ages in Western Europe and in the Islamic Golden Age (normally in translation), but Greek literary, oratorical and historical works (such as Homer , the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides ) were not studied in either the Latin or medieval Islamic worlds ; in the Middle Ages these sorts of texts were only studied by Byzantine scholars. Some argue that the Timurid Renaissance in Samarkand and Herat , whose magnificence toned with Florence as

5049-713: The Late Middle Ages have led some to theorize that its unusual social climate allowed the emergence of a rare cultural efflorescence. Italy did not exist as a political entity in the early modern period. Instead, it was divided into smaller city-states and territories: the Neapolitans controlled the south, the Florentines and the Romans at the center, the Milanese and the Genoese to

5202-745: The Levant . Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Iberia and Sicily , which became important centers for this transmission of ideas. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, many schools dedicated to the translation of philosophical and scientific works from Classical Arabic to Medieval Latin were established in Iberia, most notably the Toledo School of Translators . This work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of

5355-688: The Medici , and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire . Other major centers were Venice , Genoa , Milan , Rome during the Renaissance Papacy , and Naples . From Italy, the Renaissance spread throughout Europe and also to American, African and Asian territories ruled by the European colonial powers of the time or where Christian missionaries were active. The Renaissance has

5508-520: The Mongoloid race and the Caucasoid race had individuals who had adapted to crowding through evolution of the endocrine system, which made them more successful in the modern world of civilization. This can be found after page 370, in the illustrative serie of number XXXII of The Origin of Races. Coon contrasted a picture of an Indigenous Australian with one of a Chinese professor. His caption "The Alpha and

5661-543: The Northern Renaissance , the Spanish Renaissance , etc. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century. The traditional view focuses more on the Renaissance's early modern aspects and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it

5814-492: The Pisa Baptistry , demonstrates that classical models influenced Italian art before the Renaissance took root as a literary movement. Applied innovation extended to commerce. At the end of the 15th century, Luca Pacioli published the first work on bookkeeping , making him the founder of accounting . The rediscovery of ancient texts and the invention of the printing press in about 1440 democratized learning and allowed

5967-905: The Rif Berbers of Morocco. Returning to Harvard as a lecturer, he conducted further fieldwork in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. In 1948 he was appointed a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and remained there until his retirement in 1963, also serving as the Curator of Ethnology at the Penn Museum . During the Second World War , he was an agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he used his anthropological fieldwork as

6120-403: The modern synthesis in biology and population genetics . In addition, they were influenced by Franz Boas , who had moved away from typological racial thinking. Rather than supporting Coon's theories, they and other contemporary researchers viewed the human species as a continuous serial progression of populations and heavily criticized Coon's Origin of Races . In a New York Times' obituary he

6273-581: The modern synthesis of biological evolution and population genetics . For some anthropologists, including Ashley Montagu and later Washburn himself, the new physical anthropology necessitated the wholesale rejection of race as a scientific category. In contrast, in Races: A Study in the Problem of Race Formation in Man (1950), Coon, together with his former student Stanley Garn and Joseph Birdsell , attempted to reconcile

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6426-463: The "fair whites" of north and central Europe. According to Huxley, On the south and west this type comes into contact and mixes with the " Melanochroi ," or "dark whites" … In these regions are found, more or less mixed with Xanthochroi and Mongoloids, and extending to a greater or less distance into the conterminous Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid and Australioid areas, the men whom I have termed Melanochroi, or dark whites. Under its best form this type

6579-587: The "father of modern science". Other examples of Da Vinci's contribution during this period include machines designed to saw marbles and lift monoliths, and new discoveries in acoustics, botany, geology, anatomy, and mechanics. A suitable environment had developed to question classical scientific doctrine. The discovery in 1492 of the New World by Christopher Columbus challenged the classical worldview. The works of Ptolemy (in geography) and Galen (in medicine) were found to not always match everyday observations. As

6732-507: The "maximum survival" of the European racial type was increased by the replacement of the indigenous peoples of the New World. He stated the history of the White race to have involved "racial survivals" of White subraces. Coon first modified Franz Weidenreich 's polycentric (or multiregional) theory of the origin of races. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in

6885-404: The 14th century with a Latin phase, when Renaissance scholars such as Petrarch , Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364–1437), and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) scoured the libraries of Europe in search of works by such Latin authors as Cicero , Lucretius , Livy , and Seneca . By the early 15th century, the bulk of the surviving such Latin literature had been recovered;

7038-635: The 1950s, he sometimes appeared on the television program called What in the World? , a game-show produced by the Penn Museum , and hosted by its director, Froelich Rainey , in which a panel of experts tried to identify an object in the museum's collection. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his wartime services and the Viking Medal in Physical Anthropology in 1952. He was also named a Membre D'Honneur of

7191-567: The 1960s and changing social attitudes challenged racial theories like Coon's that had been used by segregationists to justify discrimination and depriving people of civil rights. In 1961, Coon's cousin Carleton Putnam , wrote Race and Reason: A Yankee View , arguing a scientific basis for white supremacy and the continuation of racial segregation in the United States . After the book was made required reading for high school students in Louisiana,

7344-522: The 1st-century writer Vitruvius and the flourishing discipline of mathematics, Brunelleschi formulated the Renaissance style that emulated and improved on classical forms. His major feat of engineering was building the dome of Florence Cathedral . Another building demonstrating this style is the Basilica of Sant'Andrea, Mantua , built by Alberti. The outstanding architectural work of the High Renaissance

7497-570: The African continent was taken up in the early 20th century by African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois , who used it to attack white supremacist ideas about racial "purity". Such publications as the Journal of Negro History stressed the cross-fertilization of cultures between Africa and Europe, and adopted Sergi's view that the "civilizing" race had originated in Africa itself. H. G. Wells referred to

7650-569: The Association de la Libération française du 8 novembre 1942. From 1948 to the early 1960s, he was the Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia. Coon wrote widely for a general audience like his mentor Earnest Hooton . Coon published The Riffians , Flesh of the Wild Ox , Measuring Ethiopia , and A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent . A North Africa Story

7803-462: The Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art. However, this does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred specifically in Italy in the 14th century. The Black Death was a pandemic that affected all of Europe in the ways described, not only Italy. The Renaissance's emergence in Italy was most likely the result of the complex interaction of

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7956-571: The Caucasoid and Mongoloid races had evolved more in their separate areas after they had left Africa in a primitive form. He also believed, "The earliest Homo sapiens known, as represented by several examples from Europe and Africa, was an ancestral long-headed white man of short stature and moderately great brain size." Coon's understanding of racial typology and diversity within the Indian sub-continent changed over time. In The Races of Europe , he regarded

8109-508: The Convent of San Donato in Scopeto in Florence. The Renaissance was certainly underway before Lorenzo de' Medici came to power – indeed, before the Medici family itself achieved hegemony in Florentine society. In some ways, Renaissance humanism was not a philosophy but a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholastic mode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, Renaissance humanists would study ancient texts in their original languages and appraise them through

8262-454: The Dravidian peoples of Southern India were simply Caucasoid, and that the north of the sub-continent was also Caucasoid. In short, the Indian sub-continent (North and South) is "the easternmost outpost of the Caucasoid racial region". Underlying all of this was Coon's typological view of human history and biological variation, a way of thinking that is not taken seriously today by most anthropologists/biologists. The Civil Rights Movement of

8415-407: The European Caucasoid populations largely spoke ( Indo-European ) languages, the oldest extant language in Europe was Basque . He also acknowledged the existence of non-European Caucasoids, including various populations that did not speak Indo-European or Indo-Iranian languages, such as Hamito-Semitic and Turkish groups. During the 20th century, white supremacists and Nordicists in Europe and

8568-440: The Greek phase of Renaissance humanism was under way, as Western European scholars turned to recovering ancient Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts. Unlike with Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. Ancient Greek works on science, mathematics, and philosophy had been studied since

8721-545: The Islamic steps of Ibn Khaldun . Pico della Mirandola wrote the "manifesto" of the Renaissance, the Oration on the Dignity of Man , a vibrant defence of thinking. Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475), another humanist, is most known for his work Della vita civile ("On Civic Life"; printed 1528), which advocated civic humanism , and for his influence in refining the Tuscan vernacular to the same level as Latin. Palmieri drew on Roman philosophers and theorists, especially Cicero , who, like Palmieri, lived an active public life as

8874-417: The Mediterranean basin north into Europe in the Mesolithic era. Taller Mediterraneans (Atlanto-Mediterraneans) were Neolithic seafarers who sailed in reed-type boats and colonised the Mediterranean basin from a Near Eastern origin. He argued that they also colonised Britain & Ireland where their descendants may be seen today, characterized by dark brown hair, dark eyes and robust features. He stressed

9027-447: The Mediterranean race and were related to the North Africans; they were relatively dark-skinned, black-to-chestnut haired, and short in stature. The fact that there are no sharp distinctions between the supposed racial groups had been observed by Blumenbach and later by Charles Darwin . With the availability of new data due to the development of modern genetics, the concept of races in a biological sense has become untenable. Problems of

9180-414: The Mediterranean race as the Iberian race . While the close relationship between people living on both sides of the Mediterranean has been confirmed by modern genetics , the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense is rejected by modern scientific consensus . In 2019, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and

9333-410: The Mediterranean stock were the Libyans , the Ligurians , the Pelasgians and the Iberians . Ancient Egyptians , Ethiopians and Somalis were considered by Sergi as Hamites , themselves constituting a Mediterranean variety and one situated close to the cradle of the stock. To Sergi, the Semites were a branch of the Eurafricans who were closely related to the Mediterraneans. He also asserted that

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9486-604: The Middle East (1957). Bisitun remained the only fully-published Palaeolithic site from Iran for several decades. Coon followed up his 1949 expedition with excavations at Hotu Cave in 1951. He interpreted the site, together with Belt Cave, as the first traces of a " Mesolithic " in Iran and claimed that they showed evidence of early agriculture . Other archaeologists questioned the basis for these claims and subsequent excavations at sites such as Ganj Dareh clarified that Coon had probably conflated separate Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherer and Neolithic farmer occupations at

9639-474: The Nordic race was the northern variety of Mediterraneans that lost pigmentation through natural selection due to the environment. According to Coon, the "homeland and cradle" of the Mediterranean race was in North Africa and Southwest Asia , in the area from Morocco to Afghanistan . He further stated that Mediterraneans formed the major population element in Pakistan and North India . Coon also argued that smaller Mediterraneans had travelled by land from

9792-463: The Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. Coon held a similar belief that modern humans, Homo sapiens , arose separately in five different places from Homo erectus , "as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state", but unlike Weidenreich stressed gene flow far less. Coon's modified form of

9945-422: The Omega" was used to demonstrate his research that brain size was positively correlated with intelligence. Wherever Homo arose, and Africa is at present the most likely continent, he soon dispersed, in a very primitive form, throughout the warm regions of the Old World....If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools. By this he meant that

10098-414: The Reformation and Counter-Reformation clashed, the Northern Renaissance showed a decisive shift in focus from Aristotelean natural philosophy to chemistry and the biological sciences (botany, anatomy, and medicine). The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements. Some view this as a " scientific revolution ", heralding

10251-618: The Renaissance began in Italy, and why it began when it did. Accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins. Peter Rietbergen posits that various influential Proto-Renaissance movements started from roughly 1300 onwards across many regions of Europe . In stark contrast to the High Middle Ages , when Latin scholars focused almost entirely on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural science, philosophy and mathematics, Renaissance scholars were most interested in recovering and studying Latin and Greek literary, historical, and oratorical texts. Broadly speaking, this began in

10404-421: The Renaissance has close similarities to both, especially the late and early sub-periods of either. The Renaissance began in Florence , one of the many states of Italy . Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors, including Florence's social and civic peculiarities at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family,

10557-413: The Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence , then spread to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe. The term rinascita ("rebirth") first appeared in Lives of the Artists ( c.  1550 ) by Giorgio Vasari , while the corresponding French word renaissance was adopted into English as the term for this period during the 1830s. The Renaissance's intellectual basis

10710-433: The Rif Berber; studied Albanians from 1920 to 1930; traveled to Ethiopia in 1933; and in worked in Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans from 1925 to 1939. Coon left Harvard to take up a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. Throughout the 1950s he produced academic papers, as well as many popular books for the general reader, the most notable being The Story of Man (1954). During his years at Penn in

10863-432: The United States promoted the merits of the Nordic race as the most "advanced" of all the human population groups, designating them as the " master race ". Southern/Eastern Europeans were deemed to be inferior, an argument that dated back to Arthur de Gobineau 's claims that racial mixing was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire . However, in southern Europe itself alternative models were developed which stressed

11016-523: The United States should continue the use of wartime intelligence agencies to maintain an "Invisible Empire" in the postwar period. In 1956–57, he worked for the Air Force as a photographer. Before World War II, Coon's work on race "fit comfortably into the old physical anthropology", describing the racial types supposedly present in human populations based on visible physical characteristics. He explicitly rejected any specific definition of race and used

11169-585: The Weidenreich Theory is referred to as the Candelabra Hypothesis (parallel evolution or polygenism ) that minimizes gene flow. In his 1962 book, The Origin of Races , Coon theorized that some races reached the Homo sapiens stage in evolution before others, resulting in the higher degree of civilization among some races. He had continued his theory of five races. He considered both what he called

11322-465: The West. It was in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century , who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy, and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. In the revival of neoplatonism , Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity ; on

11475-644: The Yeti expeditions that Coon was involved with were cover for American espionage in Nepal and Tibet, since both he and Slick had links to US intelligence agencies, and Byrne was allegedly involved in the extraction of the 14th Dalai Lama from Tibet by the CIA in 1959. Coon's views on cryptids were a major influence on Grover Krantz , and the two were close friends in his later life. Coon's published magnum opus, The Origin of Races (1962), received mixed reactions from scientists of

11628-458: The above factors. The plague was carried by fleas on sailing vessels returning from the ports of Asia, spreading quickly due to lack of proper sanitation: the population of England , then about 4.2 million, lost 1.4 million people to the bubonic plague . Florence's population was nearly halved in the year 1347. As a result of the decimation in the populace the value of the working class increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer

11781-551: The alleged differences between the Nordic and the Mediterranean people. Such debates arose from responses to ancient writers who had commented on differences between northern and southern Europeans . The Greek and Roman people considered the Germanic and some Celtic peoples to be wild, red haired barbarians. Aristotle contended that the Greeks were an ideal people because they possessed

11934-476: The arch on a monumental. Renaissance vaults do not have ribs; they are semi-circular or segmental and on a square plan, unlike the Gothic vault, which is frequently rectangular. Renaissance artists were not pagans, although they admired antiquity and kept some ideas and symbols of the medieval past. Nicola Pisano (c. 1220 – c. 1278) imitated classical forms by portraying scenes from the Bible. His Annunciation , from

12087-692: The beginning of the modern age, others as an acceleration of a continuous process stretching from the ancient world to the present day. Significant scientific advances were made during this time by Galileo Galilei , Tycho Brahe , and Johannes Kepler . Copernicus, in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres ), posited that the Earth moved around the Sun. De humani corporis fabrica ( On

12240-469: The center of a cultural rebirth, were linked to the Ottoman Empire , whose conquests led to the migration of Greek scholars to Italian cities. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity. Muslim logicians, most notably Avicenna and Averroes , had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and

12393-529: The central role of the Mediterraneans in his works, claiming "The Mediterraneans occupy the center of the stage; their areas of greatest concentration are precisely those where civilisation is the oldest. This is to be expected, since it was they who produced it and it, in a sense, that produced them". C. G. Seligman also asserted that "it must, I think, be recognized that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievement to its credit than any other, since it

12546-562: The concept include: It "is not useful or necessary in research", scientists are not able to agree on the definition of a certain proposed race, and they do not even agree on the number of races, with some proponents of the concept suggesting 300 or even more "races". Also, data are not reconcilable with the concept of a treelike evolution nor with the concept of "biologically discrete, isolated, or static" populations. After discussing various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races, Alan R. Templeton concludes in 2016: "[T]he answer to

12699-443: The concept of race. Nevertheless, historian Peter Sachs Collopy has noted that Coon was able to maintain cordial relationships with many of those he had disagreements with, rooted in his belief in the importance of academic collegiality . Although some of these interpersonal conflicts faded over time—Coon wrote that he had "buried the now-rusty hatchet" with Dobzhansky in a letter to him in 1975—the animosity between Coon and Montagu

12852-566: The concept to describe both highly specific groupings of people and continent-spanning racial types. In The Races of Europe (1939), for example, an update of William Z. Ripley 's 1899 book of the same title , he distinguished between at least four racial types and sub-types of Jewish people , but also maintained that there existed a single, primordial Jewish race, characterised by a Jewish nose and other physical features that together form "a quality of looking Jewish". In these early works Coon alluded to essential, "pure" racial types that produced

13005-495: The contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. But a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for

13158-410: The emerging understanding of human genetics negated race as a scientific category. In The Origins of Races (1962), Coon set forth his theory that there were five distinct subspecies of Homo sapiens that evolved in parallel in different parts of the world, and that some had evolved further than others. The book was widely castigated upon its publication and marked a decisive break between Coon and

13311-482: The era. Ernst Mayr praised the work for its synthesis as having an "invigorating freshness that will reinforce the current revitalization of physical anthropology". A book review by Stanley Marion Garn criticised Coon's parallel view of the origin of the races with little gene flow but praised the work for its racial taxonomy and concluded: "an overall favorable report on the now famous Origin of Races". Sherwood Washburn and Ashley Montagu were heavily influenced by

13464-530: The first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus , helped pave the way for the Reformation . Well after the first artistic return to classicism had been exemplified in the sculpture of Nicola Pisano , Florentine painters led by Masaccio strove to portray

13617-529: The great lakes, near the sources of the Nile, including Somalia, and which later spread from there to populate North Africa , and the circum-Mediterranean region. Sergi 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." He explained this taxonomy as inspired by an understanding of "the morphology of

13770-645: The greatest transmissions of ideas in history. The movement to reintegrate the regular study of Greek literary, historical, oratorical, and theological texts back into the Western European curriculum is usually dated to the 1396 invitation from Coluccio Salutati to the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355–1415) to teach Greek in Florence. This legacy was continued by a number of expatriate Greek scholars, from Basilios Bessarion to Leo Allatius . The unique political structures of Italy during

13923-438: The height of the epidemic due to the chaotic conditions in the city, but a small group of officials was appointed to conduct the affairs of the city, which ensured continuity of government. It has long been a matter of debate why the Renaissance began in Florence , and not elsewhere in Italy. Scholars have noted several features unique to Florentine cultural life that may have caused such a cultural movement. Many have emphasized

14076-652: The human body, such as crania and nose sizes) as a means asserting racial types and categories. This was Lloyd Cabot Briggs, author of Living Races of the Sahara Desert (1958) and later of No More for Ever: A Saharan Jewish Town (1962) about the Jews of the Mzab region of the Algerian Sahara, which he wrote with Norina Lami Guède (née Maria Esterina Giovanni). The historian Sarah Abreyava Stein (who argued that Guede had done most of

14229-464: The human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers , most famously Niccolò Machiavelli , sought to describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote De hominis dignitate ( Oration on the Dignity of Man , 1486),

14382-477: The humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art. Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of antiquity , while the fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek , many of which had fallen into obscurity in

14535-493: The immune system, leaving young children without a fighting chance. Children in city dwellings were more affected by the spread of disease than the children of the wealthy. The Black Death caused greater upheaval to Florence's social and political structure than later epidemics. Despite a significant number of deaths among members of the ruling classes, the government of Florence continued to function during this period. Formal meetings of elected representatives were suspended during

14688-413: The increased need for labor, workers traveled in search of the most favorable position economically. The demographic decline due to the plague had economic consequences: the prices of food dropped and land values declined by 30–40% in most parts of Europe between 1350 and 1400. Landholders faced a great loss, but for ordinary men and women it was a windfall. The survivors of the plague found not only that

14841-427: The independent city-republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set off a vast unprecedented Commercial Revolution that preceded and financed the Renaissance. Historian Leon Poliakov offers a critical view in his seminal study of European racist thought: The Aryan Myth . According to Poliakov, the use of ethnic origin myths are first used by Renaissance humanists "in

14994-410: The interactions among Coon, segregationist Carleton Putnam , geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky , and anthropologist Sherwood Washburn . The paper concludes that Coon actively aided the segregationist cause in violation of his own standards for scientific objectivity. Jackson found in the archived Coon papers records of repeated efforts by Coon to aid Putnam's efforts to provide intellectual support to

15147-577: The introduction of modern banking and the field of accounting. The Renaissance period started during the crisis of the Late Middle Ages and conventionally ends by the 1600s with the waning of humanism , and the advents of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation , and in art the Baroque period. It had a different period and characteristics in different regions, such as the Italian Renaissance,

15300-464: The language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome". Above all, humanists asserted "the genius of man ... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind". Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers and applied them in critiques of contemporary government, following

15453-437: The late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto . As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of literary Latin and an explosion of vernacular literatures , beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch ; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering

15606-527: The late 1950s, he was approached by Life magazine about either joining Tom Slick and Peter Byrne's expedition to the Himalayas to search for evidence of Yeti, or organising his own expedition. Although Coon spent some time planning the logistics, in the end neither materialised. Coon believed that cryptid "Wild Men" were relict populations of Pleistocene apes and that, if their existence could be proved scientifically, they would lend support to his theory of

15759-727: The light-skinned Nordic race descended from the Eurafricans. According to Robert Ranulph Marett , "it is in North Africa that we must probably place the original hotbed of that Mediterranean race". Later in the 20th century, the concept of a distinctive Mediterranean race was still considered useful by theorists such as Earnest Hooton in Up From the Ape (1931) and Carleton S. Coon in his revised edition of Ripley's Races of Europe (1939). These writers subscribed to Sergi's depigmentation theory that

15912-444: The meeting had read the book, and that only one hand was raised. Coon published The Origin of Races in 1962. In its "Introduction", he described the book as part of the outcome of his project he conceived (in light of his work on The Races of Europe ) around the end of 1956, for a work to be titled along the lines of Races of the World . He said that since 1959 he had proceeded with the intention to follow The Origin of Races with

16065-509: The merits of Mediterranean peoples, drawing on established traditions dating from ancient and Renaissance claims about the superiority of civilisation in the south. Giuseppe Sergi 's much-debated book The Mediterranean Race (1901) argued that the Mediterranean race had likely originated from a common ancestral stock that evolved in the Sahara region or the Eastern part of Africa , in the region of

16218-592: The north and west respectively, and the Venetians to the north east. 15th-century Italy was one of the most urbanized areas in Europe. Many of its cities stood among the ruins of ancient Roman buildings; it seems likely that the classical nature of the Renaissance was linked to its origin in the Roman Empire's heartland. Historian and political philosopher Quentin Skinner points out that Otto of Freising (c. 1114–1158),

16371-468: The ongoing resistance to racial integration, but cautioned Putnam against statements that could identify Coon as an active ally (Jackson also noted that both men had become aware that they had General Israel Putnam as a common ancestor, making them (at least distant) cousins, but Jackson indicated neither when either learned of the family relationship nor whether they had a more recent common ancestor). Alan H. Goodman (2000) has said that Coon's main legacy

16524-503: The partial displacement of racial types. He asserted that Europe was the refined product of a long history of racial progression. He also posited that historically "different strains in one population have showed differential survival values and often one has reemerged at the expense of others (in Europeans)", in The Races of Europe, The White Race and the New World (1939). Coon suggested that

16677-482: The present problem and has given me unexpected results which were often afterwards confirmed by archaeology or history." According to Sergi, the Mediterranean race was the "greatest race of the world" and was singularly responsible for the most accomplished civilizations of antiquity, including those of Ancient Egypt , Ancient Greece , Ancient Persia , Ancient Rome , Carthage , Hittite Anatolia , Land of Punt , Mesopotamia and Phoenicia . The four great branches of

16830-419: The prevailing cultural conditions at the time. Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492) was the catalyst for an enormous amount of arts patronage, encouraging his countrymen to commission works from the leading artists of Florence, including Leonardo da Vinci , Sandro Botticelli , and Michelangelo Buonarroti . Works by Neri di Bicci , Botticelli, Leonardo, and Filippino Lippi had been commissioned additionally by

16983-459: The prices of food were cheaper but also that lands were more abundant, and many of them inherited property from their dead relatives. The spread of disease was significantly more rampant in areas of poverty. Epidemics ravaged cities, particularly children. Plagues were easily spread by lice, unsanitary drinking water, armies, or by poor sanitation. Children were hit the hardest because many diseases, such as typhus and congenital syphilis , target

17136-488: The publication of The Origin of Races was personal as well as academic. Coon had known Ashley Montagu and Dobzhansky for decades and the three men often corresponded and wrote positive reviews of each other's work before 1962. Their vociferous criticism of Origins severed their friendship and affected Coon on a personal and emotional level. In a letter to Dobzhansky shortly after its publication, Coon advised him that he considered his critiques defamatory and had consulted

17289-412: The qualities of the ideal citizen. The dialogues include ideas about how children develop mentally and physically, how citizens can conduct themselves morally, how citizens and states can ensure probity in public life, and an important debate on the difference between that which is pragmatically useful and that which is honest. The humanists believed that it is important to transcend to the afterlife with

17442-769: The question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no." Carleton S. Coon Carleton Stevens Coon (June 23, 1904 – June 3, 1981) was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania . He is best known for his scientific racist theories concerning the parallel evolution of human races , which were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific by modern science. Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts , Coon became interested in anthropology after attending Earnest Hooton's lectures at Harvard University . He obtained his PhD in 1928 based on an ethnographic study of

17595-550: The race concept with the new physical anthropology's emphasis on genetics and adaptation. This was followed by Coon's magnum opus , The Origin of Races (1962), which put forward a theory of the origins of essential racial types, however distinct from what is described by the model of multiregional evolution (MRE) as it drastically understates the role played by gene flow (whereas MRE requires it). Coon concluded that sometimes different racial types annihilated other types, while in other instances warfare and/or settlement led to

17748-483: The research) noted that Briggs and Coon corresponded during the writing of No More for Ever , joking, for example, about the genital depilation customs of Jewish women in Ghardaïa . After the war, Coon returned to Harvard, but retained ties to the OSS and its successor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was a scientific consultant to the CIA from 1948 to 1950, and in 1945 wrote an influential paper that argued that

17901-544: The role played by the Medici , a banking family and later ducal ruling house , in patronizing and stimulating the arts. Some historians have postulated that Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance as a result of luck, i.e., because " Great Men " were born there by chance: Leonardo, Botticelli and Michelangelo were all born in Tuscany . Arguing that such chance seems improbable, other historians have contended that these "Great Men" were only able to rise to prominence because of

18054-522: The same time". Even cities and states beyond central Italy, such as the Republic of Florence at this time, were also notable for their merchant republics , especially the Republic of Venice. Although in practice these were oligarchical , and bore little resemblance to a modern democracy , they did have democratic features and were responsive states, with forms of participation in governance and belief in liberty. The relative political freedom they afforded

18207-524: The scientific mainstream. He resigned the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1961, after it voted to condemn a white supremacist book written by Coon's cousin Carleton Putnam . Though Coon continued to defend his theories until his death and rejected the accusations that he was a racist, they were quickly excluded from the scientific consensus as "outmoded [...], typological and racist". Aside from physical anthropology, Coon conducted

18360-454: The secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity and through novel approaches to thought. Political philosopher Hans Kohn describes it as an age where "Men looked for new foundations"; some like Erasmus and Thomas More envisioned new reformed spiritual foundations, others. in the words of Machiavelli , una lunga sperienza delle cose moderne ed una continua lezione delle antiche (a long experience with modern life and

18513-457: The separate origins of human races. Cultural historian Colin Dickey has argued that the search for Sasquatch and Yeti are inextricably linked to racism: "For an anthropologist like Coon, invested in finding some sort of scientific basis to justify his racism, Wild Men lore offered a compelling narrative, a chance to prove a scientific basis for his white supremacy." It has also been speculated that

18666-562: The separate origins of human races. He was involved in planning 'Yeti-hunting' expeditions to Nepal and Tibet, though it has also been speculated that these were cover for espionage. Coon was married twice, first to Mary Goodale and then to Lisa Dougherty Geddes. He had two sons, including Carleton S. Coon Jr. , a diplomat who served as the American Ambassador to Nepal. He died in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1981. Carleton Stevens Coon

18819-537: The septum; large open eyes." Agreeing with Cipriani 's classification, Biasutti also adopted a category of "Ibero-Insular" for a more archaic and isolated type observed in Sardinia , and especially among the South Eastern Sardinians , which went by the specific name of Paleo-Sardinian . According to Giuseppe Sergi , the earliest known inhabitants of Sardinia belonged, on the basis of the skeletons unearthed, to

18972-407: The service of a new born chauvinism". Many argue that the ideas characterizing the Renaissance had their origin in Florence at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1374), as well as the paintings of Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337). Some writers date the Renaissance quite precisely; one proposed starting point

19125-406: The sites. Coon was, up to his death, a proponent of the existence of bipedal cryptids , including Sasquatch and Yeti . His 1954 book The Story of Man included a chapter on "Giant Apes and Snowmen" and a figure showing the purported footprints of an "Abominable Snowman" alongside those of extinct hominids, and near the end of his life he wrote a paper on "Why There Has to Be a Sasquatch". In

19278-456: The skull as revealing those internal physical characters of human stocks which remain constant through long ages and at far remote spots[...] As 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

19431-676: The so-called "Veddoids" of India ("tribal" Indians, or "Adivasi") as closely related to other peoples in the South-Pacific ("Australoids"), and he also believed that this supposed human lineage (the "Australoids") was an important genetic substratum in Southern India. As for the north of the sub-continent, it was an extension of the Caucasoid range. By the time Coon coauthored The Living Races of Man , he thought that India's Adivasis were an ancient Caucasoid-Australoid mix who tended to be more Caucasoid than Australoid (with great variability), that

19584-836: The southern and insular parts of Europe. According to William Z. Ripley , the marked features of the Mediterranean race were dark hair, dark eyes, a long face, dolichocephalic skull, and a variable narrow nose. C. S. Coon wrote that marked Mediterranean features included skin color ranging "from pink or peaches-and-cream to a light brown", a relatively prominent and aquiline nose , considerable body hair, and dark brown to black hair. According to Renato Biasutti , frequent Mediterranean traits included "skin color 'matte'-white or brunet-white, chestnut or dark chestnut eyes and hair , not excessive pilosity; medium-low stature (162), body of moderately longilinear forms; dolichomorphic skull (78) with rounded occiput; oval face; leptorrhine nose (68) with straight spine, horizontal or inclined downwards base of

19737-532: The specific races he observed through hybridization , but did not attempt to explain how or where these types arose. The immediate post-war period marked a decisive break in Coon's work on race as the conventional, typological approach was challenged by the "new physical anthropology". Led by Coon's former classmate Sherwood Washburn , this was a movement to shift the field away from description and classification and towards an understanding of human variability grounded in

19890-881: The structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past." The first physical and social description of the Mediterranean race (then termed "Celtic race") was given by the Scottish scientist William Rhind in 1851: The Celtic Race (anc. χελτοι, Galatæ, Pyreni), are characterised by a well-formed head, elongated from front to back, and moderate in breadth; face oval; features well defined and elegantly formed; complexion dark; dark brown or black eyes; black hair turning early grey; form middle size, handsome; feet and hands small. Mental powers quick, active and energetic, rather than profound. Passions and affections strong. Fond of society, but not forgetful of injuries. Monarchial in their governments. They occupy

20043-564: The works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael representing artistic pinnacles that were much imitated by other artists. Other notable artists include Sandro Botticelli , working for the Medici in Florence, Donatello , another Florentine, and Titian in Venice, among others. In the Low Countries , a particularly vibrant artistic culture developed. The work of Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck

20196-481: Was 'amusing'." Coon continued to write and defend his work until his death, publishing two volumes of memoirs in 1980 and 1981. After taking up his position at Pennsylvania in 1948, Coon embarked on a series of archaeological expeditions to Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. His 1949 excavations at four cave sites in Iran ( Bisitun , Tamtama , Khunik and Belt ) were the first systematic investigations of Palaeolithic archaeology in Iran. The most significant of these

20349-456: Was Bisitun, which Coon called "Hunter's Cave", where he discovered evidence of the Mousterian industry and several human fossils that were later confirmed to belong to Neanderthals . Coon published the results of these excavations in a 1951 monograph, Cave Explorations in Iran, 1949 , and subsequently wrote a popular book about the expeditions, The Seven Caves: Archaeological Explorations in

20502-423: Was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity , while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée , have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties". The word has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as

20655-703: Was a member of the Congregational Church . Coon retired from Pennsylvania in 1963, but retained an affiliation with the Peabody Museum and continued to write until the end of his life. He appeared on several episodes of television quiz show What in the World? between 1952 and 1957. Coon died in Gloucester, Massachusetts on June 3, 1981. Science: Fiction and memoir: Renaissance The Renaissance ( UK : / r ɪ ˈ n eɪ s ən s / rin- AY -sənss , US : / ˈ r ɛ n ə s ɑː n s / REN -ə-sahnss )

20808-627: Was an account of his work in North Africa 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. During that time, Coon was affiliated with the United States Office of Strategic Services , the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency . Coon served as a mentor to another Harvard-educated OSS agent and anthropologist who embraced anthropometry (measuring features of

20961-477: Was an extension of the Middle Ages. The beginnings of the period—the early Renaissance of the 15th century and the Italian Proto-Renaissance from around 1250 or 1300—overlap considerably with the Late Middle Ages , conventionally dated to c.  1350–1500 , and the Middle Ages themselves were a long period filled with gradual changes, like the modern age; as a transitional period between both,

21114-652: Was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts on June 23, 1904. His parents were John Lewis Coon, a cotton factor , and Bessie Carleton. His family had Cornish American roots and two of his ancestors fought in the American Civil War . As a child, he listened to his grandfather's stories of the war and of traveling in the Middle East , and accompanied his father on business trips to Egypt, inspiring an early interest in Egyptology . He initially attended Wakefield High School , but

21267-634: Was conducive to academic and artistic advancement. Likewise, the position of Italian cities such as Venice as great trading centres made them intellectual crossroads. Merchants brought with them ideas from far corners of the globe, particularly the Levant . Venice was Europe's gateway to trade with the East, and a producer of fine glass , while Florence was a capital of textiles. The wealth such business brought to Italy meant large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned and individuals had more leisure time for study. One theory that has been advanced

21420-402: Was expelled after breaking a water pipe and flooding the school's basement, after which he went to Phillips Academy . Coon was a precocious student, learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphs at an early age and excelling at Ancient Greek . Wakefield was an affluent and almost exclusively white town. Coon's biographer, William W. Howells , noted that his "only apparent awareness of ethnicity"

21573-405: Was formalized as an artistic technique. The development of perspective was part of a wider trend toward realism in the arts. Painters developed other techniques, studying light, shadow, and, famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci , human anatomy . Underlying these changes in artistic method was a renewed desire to depict the beauty of nature and to unravel the axioms of aesthetics , with

21726-441: Was founded in its version of humanism , derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy , such as that of Protagoras , who said that "man is the measure of all things". Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as

21879-459: Was hailed for "important contributions to most of the major subdivisions of modern anthropology", "pioneering contributions to the study of human transition from the hunter-gatherer culture to the first agricultural communities." and "important early work in studying the physical adaptations of humans in such extreme environments as deserts, the Arctic and high altitudes." William W. Howells , writing in

22032-561: Was in childhood fights with his Irish American neighbours. Coon himself claimed that "both anti-Semitism and racism were unknown to me before I left home at the age of fifteen, and zero to fifteen are formative years." Intending to study Egyptology, Coon enrolled at Harvard University and was able to obtain a place on a graduate course with George Andrew Reisner based on his knowledge of hieroglyphic. He also studied Arabic and English composition under Charles Townsend Copeland . However he changed his focus to anthropology after taking

22185-476: Was motivated to study the Rif by the puzzle of the "light-skinned" Riffians' presence in Africa. Throughout much of his fieldwork, he relied on his local informant Mohammed Limnibhy, and even arranged for Limnibhy to live with him in Cambridge from 1928 to 1929. After obtaining his PhD, Coon returned to Harvard as a lecturer and later a professor. In 1931 he published his dissertation as the "definitive monograph" of

22338-544: Was not his "separate evolution of races (Coon 1962)," but his "molding of race into the new physical anthropology of adaptive and evolutionary processes (Coon et al. 1950)," since he attempted to "unify a typological model of human variation with an evolutionary perspective and explained racial differences with adaptivist arguments." Coon married Mary Goodale in 1926. They had two sons, one of whom, Carleton S. Coon Jr. went on to become Ambassador to Nepal. Coon and Goodale divorced and in 1945 he married Lisa Dougherty Geddes. He

22491-490: Was particularly influential on the development of painting in Italy, both technically with the introduction of oil paint and canvas, and stylistically in terms of naturalism in representation. Later, the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder would inspire artists to depict themes of everyday life. In architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi was foremost in studying the remains of ancient classical buildings. With rediscovered knowledge from

22644-463: Was quoted as saying to a colleague, "You had Ashley Montagu in your office? And you didn't shoot him?" The enmity was reciprocated; in a 1974 letter to Stephen Jay Gould , Montagu wrote, "Coon… is a racist and an antisemite, as I know well, so when you describe Coon's letter to the editor of Natural History as 'amusing' I understand exactly what you mean—but it is so in exactly the same sense as Mein Kampf

22797-651: Was severe and lasting. Before 1962, the two were on friendly terms, but represented rival schools of anthropology (Coon studied under Hooton at Harvard; Montagu under Boas at Columbia), and Coon privately disdained his work. After the publication of Origins , they engaged in a lengthy correspondence, published in Current Anthropology , that "consisted almost entirely of bickering over minutiae, name calling, and sarcasm". Privately, Coon suspected Montagu (a target of McCarthyism ) of communist sympathies and of turning Dobzhansky and others against him. As late as 1977, he

22950-418: Was the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica , combining the skills of Bramante , Michelangelo, Raphael, Sangallo and Maderno . During the Renaissance, architects aimed to use columns, pilasters , and entablatures as an integrated system. The Roman orders types of columns are used: Tuscan and Composite . These can either be structural, supporting an arcade or architrave, or purely decorative, set against

23103-427: Was thought that the classics provided moral instruction and an intensive understanding of human behavior. A unique characteristic of some Renaissance libraries is that they were open to the public. These libraries were places where ideas were exchanged and where scholarship and reading were considered both pleasurable and beneficial to the mind and soul. As freethinking was a hallmark of the age, many libraries contained

23256-417: Was typical of its time. He described the different racial 'types' supposedly present in human populations, but rejected a specific definition of 'race' and made no attempt to explain how these types arose. This changed after 1950, as Coon attempted to defend an essentialist concept of race against the new physical anthropology of contemporaries such as Sherwood Washburn and Ashley Montagu , who argued that

23409-607: Was widely castigated by his peers in anthropology as supporting racist ideas with outmoded theory and notions which had long since been repudiated by modern science. One of his harshest critics, Theodore Dobzhansky , scorned it as providing "grist for racist mills". Geneticist Dobzhansky's shot His bolt and really gone to pot. Things which now pass above his pate Cause him to fume and fulminate In ways unacademical And anything but oecumenical. Querulous cracks with venom spattered Tell of an ethos sadly shattered. Poem written by Coon around 1963 The dispute that followed

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