What Is Race?

by CARLETON S. COON

Now that modern advances in travel and communication have thrown the peoples of the world together, interracial problems have been forced on us all. However disguised in economic or political drapery, they are the nuclear stuff of foreign affairs. A knowledge of the facts of race has never been needed as it is today. But before we can begin to discuss race objectively or clearly, we must define it.

Race is a biological concept, as applicable to fruit flies, warblers, and raccoons as to people. Zoologists tell us that a race is simply a recognizable division of what they call a polytypic species. A species is either a single population (monotypic) or a string of related populations (polytypic). The members of both types breed only within the family, so to speak. Their failure to breed at all, or successfully, with members of other species can be due to lack of opportunity, lack of interest, or inability to produce fertile offspring.

The sister populations that make up a polytypicspecies usually live in adjoining and climatically varied areas, and they interbreed along the borders. If we collect valid samples of such populations and select a particularly distinctive and measurable feature, preferably one known to be genetically controlled, and then lay out the distribution frequencies of both on a single chart, we can see to what extent the two ranges overlap. If over 75 per cent but less than 100 per cent of individuals in each species differ in this feature, then the two populations are considered to be subspecies. A subspecies is exactly the same thing as a race, in man as in any other sexually reproducing animal. If we apply this test to many of the so-called races of man — Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean — it is hard to find a valid overlap in any character. Zoologically speaking, these are not races but types.

When a population finds itself isolated from its nearest neighbors of the same species, it may develop certain peculiarities. If in the overlap test between it and another race of its parent species the ranges fail to meet, then the assumption is that a new species has been formed, provided that when its members have a chance to interbreed with those of another race of the same species they fail to do so. If, however, in a state of nature, some of them do breed successfully, then they are not separate species but very divergent races of a single oversized species.

That is exactly the situation with man. We are one enormous, varied species — Homo sapiens — because despite social pressure of a species-forming nature, whenever we have the chance some of us manage to interbreed with other races. This social pressure cannot be considered unnatural on the ground that it is channeled through culture, for it also exists within supposedly cultureless species of mammals and birds. Culture is not an opposite of nature but a highly organized part of it. Human races are unusually divergent because, long ago, bands of people spread to the far corners of the earth, forming there mutually isolated populations exposed to all extremes of climate and to many degrees of danger. They reacted to these influences as all animals do.

Important as culture seems in our air-conditioned present, at the time of man’s initial spread it offered little immediate or local advantage over the natural equipment — fur, fangs, and claws — of competing species. It is easy to understand how men with boats, skis, and fur suits could have spread to every ice-free part of the earth, but people reached those places before any of these sporting items could have been perfected. As far back as the third glacial period, Europeans hunted mammoths in the narrow corridor between the edges of the Scandinavian and Alpine ice sheets, and the ancestors of the American Indians had reached this continent from Asia before the end of the fourth glaciation.

As far as we know, the cultural equipment of these hardy people was limited to a few littlespecialized flint tools and fire. We may presume that they lived and worked in groups. Neither what they could make with these tools nor their coöperative efforts could have been adequate to protect their bodies from the rigors of all the world’s environments. Their bodies were possibly the hardiest, and certainly the most versatile, of existing complex organisms. Among some of us these qualities are still present. When Charles Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego in the Beagle, he found the Yaghan Indians paddling bark canoes in gale-swept waters. Each man and woman wore only a sealskin over the back, and derived a little warmth from a fire smoldering in a clay hearth in the bow of the canoe. When they neared the pebbly beach each woman jumped overboard to swim ashore. In the dry heat of the Kalihari desert, Bushmen clad only in skin breech clouts and sandals hunt antelope in sand hot enough to scorch off the animals’ hoofs. A Pygmy can run through a tangled forest, a Negro walks through it, and a European cuts his way with a machete. Many a white man has frozen his thin cheeks in the Arctic where the faces of Eskimos, better supplied with blood and fat, do not suffer. Bolivian Indians can reproduce their kind and rear their children at altitudes where most white people and Negroes cannot bring children to maturity.

The relative suitability of different physiques and physiological systems to all but the most extreme environments is a matter of degree. Under proper care almost any kind of person can live almost anywhere for many years. But in the formation of races and species, in man as in other animals, natural selection rarely takes place quickly. Over many generations certain genetically controlled characteristics tend to grow scarce within a population as others gradually replace them, owing to a difference in their survival values. Evolution takes time, and racial differentiation in man is an evolutionary process.

ABOUT eight thousand years ago a few people began to upset the balance of nature in which they had, like other animals, previously lived, by domesticating certain plants and animals. They could then have more food and more children. Migrations in search of new fields and pastures carried farmers and herdsmen out of the environments to which their ancestors had, over thousands of years, become physically adjusted, and set a whole new adaptive cycle in motion. The earliest of these migrations began no more than three hundred generations ago, a short time for the re-establishment of racial equilibrium.

A second major set of migrations followed the voyages and discoveries of Columbus, da Gama, and other Europeans in the late 1400s. White people with and without Negroes invaded and settled the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A mere twenty generations separates the oldest of these settlements from the present. The racial map of the world today shows the distributions of populations representing all three periods of settlement. Some are descended from the old food-gatherers, long in equilibrium with their environments; others from the food-producers who left home after 6000 B.C.; and still others from the colonists of the last five centuries and their slaves. Each of the three presents its own biological problems.

It would be difficult to count the people, scattered over the earth, who still hunt and collect food in their ancestral territories, but they probably would not fill the city of Philadelphia. If brought together they would look even more varied than the delegates to the United Nations. In Africa only the Pygmies, Bushmen, and a few specialized Negro tribes still hunt. A Caucasoid people, the Sayyads, fish and net migratory game birds in the Lake Hamun estuary between Iran and Afghanistan. India is full of small groups of refugees from the onward march of agriculture, for India contains nearly all the world’s types of environment and many nooks and crannies where simple hunters and gatherers have been able to hide for millennia. I personally have seen the Birhors, who net monkeys for their flesh in the sal forest back of Ranchi, and the Kadars, who collect honey and wild fruits in the Cardamon Hills of Kerala. Ceylon still shelters about forty unmixed and unacculturated Veddas, former lords of the island. Two Negrito tribes still remain in full vigor on the Andaman Islands, and somewhere in the shady depths of the Sumatran jungle live the Kubu and Lubu, said to be Negritos, a timid people yet unseen by anthropologists.

Little more than two centuries ago the entire continent of Australia was inhabited by many tribes and bands of hunters, who formed the largest and most isolated continuum of preagricultural peoples in the world and whose descendants are still our best source of evidence for the file of early man. Except for a few persons of mixed blood, Tasmania’s aboriginal population, black-skinned and curly-haired, disappeared nearly a century ago through white contact.

The whole core of the Old World land mass of Asia, Africa, and Europe is lacking in foodgatherers, so far noted only around the southern fringes. In the far north, where environmental conditions make agriculture impossible, reindeer herding, as an offshoot of cattle-and-horse raising farther south, has reduced the areas of foodgathering to a few spots where fishing is good, between Norway and Japan. Among the few groups of survivors two are Caucasoid, the Sea Lapps and the Ainu.

In the New World nearly half the land surface of the Americas was occupied by hunters and gatherers at the time of Columbus; today their descendants are still to be found among the Eskimos, in the forests of Alaska and Canada, and on reservations in Maine and the Western states. In South America scattered bands hunt along the game-poor eastern slopes of the Andes, and Chonos fish in the fjords of the South Chilean archipelago. The famed Yaghans are reduced to a few households, the Onas of the grasslands of northern Tierra del Fuego to about twenty-live persons.

WHEN we examine the physical characteristics of these survivors from the Ice Age and from the earliest period of migration and adaptation, one basic fact is immediately clear. All the major races of the world, without exception, and according to any competent specialist’s classification, are there before our eyes. This means that all the major races of man had evolved while all men were hunters. The two races which have risen to the greatest heights in creating civilization, the Caucasoid and the Mongoloid, are represented among the food-gatherers along with Negroids, Negritos, Bushmen, and Australoids. No major race evolved after the original segregation which produced these ancient subspecies.

Each of the surviving marginal populations so far studied is internally variable in many apparently non-adaptive features, such as hair form in Australia and face form among the African Pygmies. Among many higher organisms such variability is characteristic of features little exposed to environmental stress. Some anthropologists have mistaken this natural variability for mixture.

Each of the major racial groups also has features of its own which are difficult or impossible to explain on the basis of recent natural selection, but which may have to do with situations and requirements encountered in the past when the cultures of the world were even simpler than those of any food-gatherers within human memory, and possibly before the present races had evolved into the sapiens stage. Bushmen, Negroes, and Negritos have curving lumbar regions, tilted pelves, and a tendency to protrusion of the buttocks. Mongoloids, with flat posteriors, reach the opposite postural extreme. The lower legs and forearms of Negroes are long in proportion to thigh and upper arm lengths; Mongoloids are the opposite. Compared with other races, Negroes have heavy bones.

The skins of Negroes and Negritos are usually black, while those of Veddoids (the primitive proto-Caucasoids of India and Ceylon) who live in the same kinds of tropics are lighter or variable. Among the Bushmen, skins grow darker as one approaches the Equator from the Cape of Good Hope, and similar gradations in skin color have been observed among Mongoloids in the Old and New Worlds. The Tasmanians, who lived in a cool and cloudy island at the same distance from the Equator as New York, were as black as any inhabitant of Harlem. As their ancestors must have lived there for a very long time, we can make two observations about skin color. In some races and in certain ways black skin is a basic racial feature of great antiquity which, however and wherever it arose, is inherited in the unmixed state independently of climate. In most other races, skin color tends to be variable regionally and seasonally in concert with climatic differences.

Human skin differs from that of other animals in that it is our principal organ of heat loss, heat conservation, and hence thermal adaptation. The number of sweat glands possessed by an individual is fixed at birth, and a small man has more glands per square inch of skin than he would have had had he grown larger. Thus a Pygmy has a better cooling device than a larger man, all else equal. The amount of subcutaneous fat also has something to do with the conservation of body heat, as in the cold-living Mongoloids. In many but not all deserts, long arms and legs, long necks, and narrow bodies give hunters a maximum cooling surface area from which unimpeded breezes can absorb sweat as soon as it is secreted, and keep the body temperature within safe physiological limits. Although these apparently adaptive bodily differences occur more or less in all major races, nevertheless the skins of the major races are distinctive in ways which defy the easy explanation of climatic adaptation. These differences involve not only pigment and subcutaneous fat but also the thickness of the outer horny layer and the quantity and distribution of hair.

Human hair form is extremely variable — as variable almost as that of the cover hair of mammals of different genera. While a case can be made for the protective nature of head and beard hair in fighting, and the advantages of very tightly curled hair in keeping the head and neck cool, selection for these advantages could only have occurred in the distant past before men had learned how to cut and tie up their hair.

Another puzzler is the Mongoloid eye. In the structure of the Mongoloid head and face the temporal muscle is attached forward on the skull, pushing the eye socket forward and making it shallow; hence the characteristic position of the eyeball. As this is found in tropical as well as arctic Mongoloids, it cannot be explained on the basis of any modern adaptation. Mongoloids also have a high frequency of peculiar teeth, the so-called shovel-shaped incisors, rare among other peoples. No functional reason for this variation has been found. These peculiarities of eye socket and teeth must be listed with racial variations in pelvis position, limb segment proportions, bone density, skin structure, pigmentation, and hair form in a special category of profound and ancient racial differences.

To them may be added the peculiarities of the genital organs of African Bushmen. At rest the penis points forward. After a woman has reached puberty her labia minora begin to grow downward and become greatly elongated; meanwhile her buttocks become distended with massive deposits of fat. Bushmen are proud of these peculiarities and cherish them. In many animals, as indeed among flowering plants, the first organs to become differentiated in an incipient species are those of sex. On this evidence alone one could say that the Bushmen had started forth on the road to speciation through a sexual isolation mechanism.

How can we explain the fundamental differences between Mongoloids, Negroids (including Negritos), and Bushmen? Sewell Wright’s principle of genetic drift seems to point out the mechanism. In very ancient times the human species consisted of a large number of small, geographically isolated populations in each of which certain mutations bore no immediate adaptive advantages or disadvantages as far as climate was concerned, but replaced the corresponding earlier forms by sheer statistical accident. Some of them, as our Bushmen evidence suggests, may have become fashionable, serving as symbols of belonging together in social systems in which cooperation was essential for group survival. Members of tight little bands grew to look as alike as peas in a pod.

In other social systems coöperation may have been less important for survival than individual enterprise. Just as some of the monkeys live in homogeneous, coöperative bands, so some of the great apes are organized into individual family bands centered on a single adult male. The same can have been true of some of our most remote ancestors. Under such conditions rivalries over women and hunting territories would have given a selective advantage to size, strength, and adrenalin. It would have been to their advantage for males to grow large and exaggeratedly mature, while the females remained small and relatively unspecialized.

Size differences between the sexes are at their maximum among the Caucasoids and Australoids and at their minimum among Mongoloids and the dwarfed races, including Bushmen and Pygmies. Among some Mongoloids as well as Caucasoids and Australoids the adult form is markedly mature, as with certain American Indians and Tibetans, whose sex differences are still relatively slight.

These basic differences in sexual differentiation and in the degrees of maturation in the adult must be based on genetic differences in endocrine balance, and be further linked to variations in temperament between both individuals and races. As the only way we can explain them is to turn to conditions existing in the most remote past, when men were beginning to acquire patterns of behavior which we call culture, these differences must be both ancient and fundamental.

Had agriculture never been invented, it is a question how many more thousands of years would have had to pass before non-contiguous races had grown into species. Speciation in man is made difficult because in human populations sex plays an unusual role. Human beings at the most primitive as well as the most advanced cultural levels copulate the year round as a social exercise that reinforces the ties needed to keep parents together long enough to teach their children howto survive in the outside world. Complicated patterns of who sleeps with whom and on what occasions further weave a tight social fabric among the most primitive bands still alive. In some societies wife-lending to strangers is a common social courtesy that helps ensure amicable intergroup relations.

Under these circumstances sexual isolation could not precede genetic isolation in man as it has done in many other animal species. Genetic isolation would have to be acquired before interracial contact could be made without mixture, and culture, even of the most primitive sort, would have rendered further biological specialization unnecessary. The answer is, therefore, that man’s evolution in the direction of speciation ceased long ago; the invention of agriculture did not stop it.

Nor did the spread of agriculture terminate the process of race formation in man, which was carried on in a special sense. As the descendants of hunters moved about in search of fields and pastures, they underwent further biological change, but the new races into which they were transformed differed from one another less than the old races had done, for several reasons. Hav - ing occupied all the habitable space of the world except for remote islands of the Atlantic and Pacific, their hunting ancestors had already become adapted to all climates. Growing in numbers as they produced more and more food, the farmers and herdsmen overpopulated their territories and crowded each other along their frontiers, thus increasing the amount of mixture and the gene How between populations. The new races were formed by a combination of mixture and selection.

WE DO not know the whole history of agriculture and animal husbandry, but enough of it has been traced for present purposes. It began about 6000 B.C. in Western Asia, and by 3000 B.C. it had begun to spread to North Africa, Europe, China, and India. The people who discovered it and first carried it were Caucasoids of one or more types familiar in Western Asia today. Wherever they went they pushed aside the native peoples, who were still hunting and gathering, and in some places fishing. Owing to the length and hardship of the route, the settlers that reached China may have been fewer than those that settled Europe, North Africa, and India.

Everywhere they went they began to mix with the aborigines. In Europe and North Africa the natives were also Caucasoids, so that no major racial change occurred. Gradually out of the mixture certain new forms emerged. Genetic traits of the old population, fitted to the local conditions by millennia of natural selection, came to the fore, and most of the people of Europe today look more like the pre-agricultural hunters and fishermen of their countries than like Western Asiatic Caucasoids. In North Africa the same thing happened.

In China the indigenous population was Mongoloid, and the Caucasoids were absorbed. In India the first farmers were the ancestors of the Dravidians, who still occupy the plains and coasts of the southern part of the peninsula. Most of the aborigines whom they met were members of an ancient Caucasoid strain, and from these people they probably derived the genetic basis for their present dark skin color, useful in their new environment, but facial features could not have changed much because the two looked alike in the first place. A later wave brought the Aryans, who were able to acquire the dark-skin genes secondhand from the Dravidians. Actually the modern Aryans of India vary tremendously in skin color, although in facial features and hair form most of them look European. Very little mixture was needed to darken their skins, because of the highly selective value of heavy pigment.

The farmers of China brought into cultivation many new plants unknown to the West and better suited than the original West Asiatic species to the summer-rain climate of Eastern and Southern Asia. Mongoloid peoples carried these plants down to Indochina, Siam, and Burma, and out into Indonesia. These all became Mongoloid countries. Except for one fact, India could have become a Mongoloid country just as easily, for Mongoloids have been moving down over the Tibetan border for thousands of years. One skull which I have seen from the Indus Valley civilization was fully Mongoloid. India did not become Mongoloid because the Mongoloids of Tibet, being adapted for cold and high altitude, are quickly bred out in the hot and steaming plain. Indochina, Siam, and Burma became and remained Mongoloid countries because the local food-gatherers were Mongoloid too. They served the invaders from the north as the Veddoids had the Dravidians in India, by giving them a genetic structure with which to survive the rigors of the new environment.

In the New World, agriculture may be just as ancient as in the Old, but its dissemination created far fewer racial problems because all the people involved were American Indians.

In Negro Africa, agriculture began to spread from a center near the mouth of the Niger River about the time of Christ, and bands and tribes of Negroes carried it to the Indian Ocean and almost to the Gape of Good Hope, arriving in South Africa at about the same time as the Dutchmen. As they passed through the Congo forest they mixed to a certain extent with the Pygmies, and farther south and east they absorbed remnants of Bushmen, as well as some of the long-faced tribes formerly known as Hamites. Without reasonable doubt these absorptions along the way helped the migrating Negroes adapt themselves to a number of new situations. For example, the Zulus, when they faced the British forces, were bigger and heavier men than their ancestors.

In every instance, when a new people brought agriculture into a region inhabited by foodgatherers, the invaders were enabled to survive and to increase in numbers only by absorbing useful genes from the natives, who had already reached a state of biological equilibrium with their surroundings. This took a long time. In every instance but one the natives were members of the same ancient division of mankind as the invaders, and the product was merely a genetic recombination on a single broad base. The one exception was China, where the invaders crossed a major racial frontier and became obliterated.

The third great period of migration, which began about A.D. 1500, carried Western Europeans — themselves a sorted-out recombination of several Caucasoid subraces — to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and to the islands of the Caribbean.

These Europeans who settled the new worlds in the Age of Exploration were different from their stay-at-home kinfolk in small but meaningful ways, and after reaching their destination they changed in as little time as one generation. Climate is already showing a selective effect on their descendants, as the comparative incidence of skin cancer among whites of the same stock in Texas and New England indicates.

Meanwhile, in the United States the Indian population, long adapted to local conditions, has begun to increase, as has that of the aborigines in Australia. Now that they no longer walk on the road to genetic extinction, these two peoples face the historic alternative, absorption. It is easy to ignore this now, but absorption, recombination, and selection are the very steps that followed each other in the racial history of Europe, India, and Southeast Asia, where the aborigines were few indeed compared with the unacclimated settlers. The process took a very long time, but it may also take us a long time to reach racial equilibrium. Several centuries from now, when the current excitement over integration may be looked at objectively, our descendants may wonder why so much attention was paid to the African and so little to the American Indian elements in our national gene pool.

In any discussion of racial problems a question is always raised about the relative intelligence (however this elusive characteristic may be defined) of different populations. Physical anthropologists cannot agree on this any more than psychologists can. However, we do know that wide individual differences exist in the anatomical and physiological properties of the human brain and that some of these are racial. As body form and temperament are linked, if one varies racially the other must also. But intelligence, like every other animal and human attribute, is subject to natural selection. In a situation where only the clever can survive, the dull die. In another situation, where life is easy as long as everyone is happy, and little ingenuity is required to provide food and shelter and there is no premium on outstanding leadership, the exercise of his superior imagination by an unusually clever person threatens the social equilibrium. He has become a nuisance and a laughingstock. In his case the genetic basis for his superior intelligence may turn out to be a lethal mutation.

As in every social unit a struggle is constantly going on between stability and progress, culture inhibits the evolution of high intelligence as well as promotes it. Each race has had a unique cultural history based ultimately on the series of environmental challenges it has had to meet and how it has been able to meet them, a unique sequence of events in the evolution of its own genetic range of intelligence. It would be odd if, despite these differences in experience, the genetic bases for intelligence in different races turned out to be either homogeneous or identical.

Nevertheless, in most if not all races men of superior intelligence are born from time to time. In the past it was rarely possible for many of them to meet and exchange ideas, and even in social situations where they were accepted, much of their individual brainpower was wasted. Thanks to the new techniques of transport and communication of our century, world-wide meetings of the intellectual elite of all races are becoming common. In them it has often been observed that the world’s most intelligent men find it completely natural to forget about race, for the mutual stimulation of intellectual exchange creates in such a group a new level of equilibrium, in which looking alike is of no importance.

It seems safe to predict that the frequent association of the world’s top minds in various disciplines can turn out to be the equivalent of that step in biological evolution for which many have been waiting: the appearance of a new and superior race based on a new adaptation, not to a special physical environment, but to the need of solving special problems which men have themselves created. As it will be drawn from many races, no master-race behavior need be feared.

The point of view expressed in this paper is a fairly new one. By studying human variations in time, space, and culture, with the tools of biologists, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians, we are gradually gaining a fresh insight into the mysteries of who and what we are, and the more we learn about man once we treat him purely as another animal, the more remarkable he becomes. Our fresh insight interprets both racism and anti-racism as basically irrational but functional natural phenomena as unschemed as hunger, the sex drive, fear, and rage. Their antithetical functions pull for and against new species formation, a question which, in the case of man, will, as with any other animal, be decided without reference to the rationalizations of either set of opponents.