Carleton S. Coon
Carleton Stevens Coon, was an eminent American anthropologist, born June 23, 1904 in Wakefield, Massachusetts. He attended post secondary education at Harvard University, earning his A.B., A.M., and Ph. D. (1928). Coon taught at Harvard until he resigned in 1948 to become Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania until 1963. He also became Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum in Philadelphia. Coon was active in both archaeology and cultural/physical anthropology. He conducted controversial studies of the origins and modern variations of human racial types. His region of specialization was North Africa and the Near East. Coon worked in Morocco in 1925-1928, 1939, 1947, and 1962-1963.
His books include The Origins of Race (1962), The Story of Man (1954), The Races of Europe (1939), Races: A Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man, The Hunting Peoples, Living Races of Man (1965), Seven Caves: Archaeological Exploration in the Middle East, Adventures and Discoveries: The Autobiography of Carleton S. Coon (1981), Mountains of Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs, Yengema Cave Report (his work in Sierra Leone), and Caravan: the Story of the Middle East (1958). A North Africa Story (1980) is an account of his work during World War II.
Starting in the late 1950s, Coon's work increasingly attracted the ire of younger anthropologists, most notably Ashley Montagu, who believed it essentially racist. However, Coon's work was characterized by careful, fully documented field observation and measurement while that of his detractors was often based essentially on abstraction driven by social ideals. As of the turn of the millennium, Coon's opponents have effectively brought the newer generations of students to their view and race is widely held by them to be useless in any formal taxonomic sense. But concurrent expansion in the use of the terms "ethnic group" or "ethnic origin" and the substitution of the term "population" as a near synonym for "race" in many contexts show how difficult it will be to eradicate all notions of sub-specific human classification.
Coon's hypothesis that Homo sapiens arose five separate times from Homo erectus in five separate places, "as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state", thus providing origins in deep time for his five races of mankind, no longer has wide currency among scholars. See Multi-regional origin for a discussion of theories of this type.
Coon served in the US Air Force in 1956-1957 and in the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His work with the OSS in the early 1940s involved espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in German-occupied Morocco under the guise of anthropological fieldwork, a controversial practice generally condemned by practicing anthropologists. These contributions to the war effort were dangerous, and he was wounded several times while carrying them out.
Coon was a member of the National Academy of Science and served as President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists from 1961 to 1962. He resigned his post as President in disgust after the association voted to censure the book Race and Reason: A Yankee view by Carleton Putnam, which argued against racial desegregation, even though most of the members present admitted to not having actually read it.
Coon died on June 6, 1981, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Quote
"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, page 376