Negroid

Negroid (less commonly called Congoid) is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from since-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category. The concept of dividing humans into three races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid (originally named "Ethiopian") was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history and further developed by Western scholars in the context of "racist ideologies" during the age of colonialism. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations."

Negroid (less commonly called Congoid) is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from since-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category. The concept of dividing humans into three races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid (originally named "Ethiopian") was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history and further developed by Western scholars in the context of "racist ideologies" during the age of colonialism. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations." ==== Carleton Coon ==== American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon published his much debated Origin of Races in 1962¹. Coon divided the species Homo sapiens into five groups: Besides the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Australoid races, he posited two races among the indigenous populations of sub-Saharan Africa: the Capoid race (named for the Cape of Good Hope) in the south, and the Congoid race. In 1982, he used Negroid and Congoid as synonyms. Coon's thesis was that Homo erectus had already been divided into five different races or subspecies. "Homo Erectus then evolved into Homo Sapiens not once but five times, as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state." He thought the Caucasoid race had passed the threshold to Homo sapiens about 200,000 years earlier than the Negroid race, thus giving segregationists in the southern US the opportunity to make political use of his thesis in their fight against the civil rights movement. Although Coon publicly assumed a neutral stance regarding segregation, some fellow anthropologists accused him of being racist because of his "clear insensitivity to social issues". In private conversations and correspondence with his cousin Carleton Putnam, a prominent supporter of white supremacy, he went much further, helping Putnam "hone his arguments against integration". Coon's evolutionary approach was criticized on the basis that such sorting criteria generally do not produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames. Monatagu (1963) argued that Coon's theory on the speciation of Congoids and other Homo sapiens was unlikely because the transmutation of one species to another was a markedly gradual process. Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerging genetics to classify humans, the debate over Origin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted".

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