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. Quotes The Americans of colonial British ancestry are not like Englishmen in the larger sense of the word. The English who went to America in the Colonial period were a definitely selected group — selected on the basis of religion, social and economic position, and geographical distribution. Once in America, under new conditions, comparative isolation, and the intensive cross-breeding of relatively few family lines, this differentiation was accentuated. Once the arable lands of New England and New York State had been cleared and cultivated, the farmers who moved westward into the fertile Ohio Valley, and on successively to Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, were not typical examples of the total population of which they were drawn. The selection of the mountain men of the Rockies, and of the early cattle rangers of the Plains was even more noticeable. The Races of Europe (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1939), general introduction, p. 8 If men of the Early and Middle Pleistocene, no matter how strong their jaws or how large their teeth, ate raw roots and raw meat, they can have had little time during the average day for hunting and tool-making; but once man began to cook his food, he could cut down his eating time to two hours a day. With the rest of the hours of dawn and daylight he could go hunting, carry home his game, work on his weapons, talk with his kin, and teach his sons many skills. The introduction of cooking may well have been the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal-like material existence into one that was more fully human. The Story of Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), ch. 2, p. 63 It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village. The Story of Man (1954), ch. 11, p. 376 If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools. The Origins of Races (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), ch. 12, p. 656 External links Category:1904 births Category:1981 deaths Category:Anthropologists from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Harvard University alumni Category:University of Pennsylvania faculty Category:People from Massachusetts