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 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 World War II, he was an agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he used his anthropological fieldwork as a cover for an arms-smuggling operation in Vichy France-controlled Morocco. He was awarded the Legion of Merit and after the war he retained ties to the military and the OSS's 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), 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 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 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". His parents were John Lewis Coon, a cotton factor, and Bessie Carleton.
Coon 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.
Academic career
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 the Rif Berber;
After the war, Coon returned to Harvard. He wrote an influential paper in 1945 arguing that the U.S. should continue the use of wartime intelligence agencies to maintain an "Invisible Empire" in the postwar period. He served as a scientific consultant to the CIA from 1948 to 1950 and from 1956 to 1957, worked as a photographer for the Air Force.
Racial theories
thumb|right|Photographs of men from northern Albania taken by Coon in 1929 and published in The Mountains of Giants (1950). This "descriptive" approach was typical of Coon's work in physical anthropology before World War II.
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 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 the specific races he observed through hybridization, but did not attempt to explain how or where these types arose. 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)". He suggested that the "maximum survival" of the European racial type was increased by the replacement of the indigenous peoples of the New World and stated that the history of the white race to involved "racial survivals" of white subraces.
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 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 the race concept with the new physical anthropology's emphasis on genetics and adaptation. He presents some of his theories of racial origins in The Story of Man (1954), in which he states that "Racial discrimination is a holdover from a time when it served a purpose, when a racial division of labor carried with it a certain material and social efficiency." He goes on to label race a nuisance due to its being misunderstood.
In 1962, Coon published his The Origin of Races, which advances his incorrect theories of the origins of essential racial types. He modified Franz Weidenreich's polycentric (or multiregional) theory of the origin of races, which states that human races evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens (although Weidenreich incorporated gene flow between populations). Coon held that besides H. erectus, five subspecies each lived "in its own territory, [passing] a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state". His form of polygenism is referred to by some as the Candelabra Hypothesis due to its lack of concern for gene flow. Coon suggested that the racial groups demonstrated the advance of civilization, for instance the Mongoloids and Caucasoids adapting to overcrowding by means of an evolved endocrine system. He stated that "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," although he had admitted in The Story of Man that superficial details like skin color were conjectural. Coon also claimed that racial types sometimes annihilated others, while in other cases warfare and/or settlement led to their partial displacement. He asserted that Europe was the refined product of many years of racial progression.
Races in the Indian sub-continent
Coon's understanding of racial typology and diversity within the Indian sub-continent changed over time. In The Races of Europe, he regarded 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 (1965), he thought that India's Adivasis were an ancient Caucasoid-Australoid mix who tended to be more Caucasoid than Australoid (with great variability), that 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 or biologists.
Debate on race
thumb|right| [[Carleton Putnam (1901–1998). Coon corresponded with Putnam about his book Race and Reason (1961), a defence of racial segregation and white supremacy, and resigned from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists when it passed a motion condemning it.]]
The Civil Rights Movement of 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 distant 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 U.S. After the book was made required reading for high-school students in Louisiana, 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 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 a sequel, so the two would jointly fulfill the goals of the original project. (He published The Living Races of Man in 1965.) The book asserted that the human species divided into five races before it had evolved into H. sapiens. Further, he suggested that the races evolved into H. 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 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, Theodosius Dobzhansky, scorned it as providing "grist for racist mills".
The dispute that followed 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.
Other work
Archaeology
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 was Bisitun, which Coon called "Hunter's Cave", where he discovered evidence of the Mousterian industry 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 the Middle East (1957). Bisitun remained the only fully-published Palaeolithic site from Iran for several decades. 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 near the end of his life he wrote a paper on "Why There Has to Be a Sasquatch". In 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. 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 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 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." 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:
Jackson found in the archived Coon papers records of repeated efforts by Coon to aid Putnam's efforts to provide intellectual support to 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 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."
Personal life
thumb|right|Mary Coon ( Goodale, left) was married to Coon between 1926 and 1944.
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 was a member of the Congregational Church.
Coon died in Gloucester, Massachusetts on June 3, 1981.