Historical story

Early descriptions of human races

Since modern humans have spread from Africa, many different groups have emerged. The term "race" was first used in the context of man by the philosopher Immanuel Kant:"That which remains unchangeable over the generations, while preserving its own character".

Until then, the term had only been used to refer to the purity of horses, royal scions and the nobility, with legal status and privileges asking for clarity about patrilineal descent. Earlier the naturalists Linnaeus and Blumenbach used the term 'varieties'.

Naturalis historia

Classical writers and thinkers such as Hippocrates, Anaximandros, Aristotle and Plato already described the outward differences between groups of people. Aristotle placed man at the top of his Scala naturae, a hierarchical staircase of all living beings.

Three hundred years later, Pliny the Elder presented his Naturalis historia, a kind of encyclopedia full of accurate observations of external differences, but also with the necessary fantasy stories about people with only one eye, one gigantic foot, with feet placed backwards or with a dog's head.

His encyclopedia was undisputed until the Middle Ages. Only in the sixteenth century did the Brussels-born 'father of anatomy' Andreas Vesalius dare to mention more real differences between groups of people.

From the thirteenth century, merchants and missionaries also returned after their long journeys to 'the East' with stories about mysterious, unknown peoples. Due to the great voyages of discovery, more and more became known about them. Columbus also came into contact with the exotic inhabitants of the New World in the west. In the Golden Age, the VOC not only brought back living animals to our Republic, such as great apes, but also exotic people! This increased the interest in the other human being and scientific research into our geographical diversity started, albeit initially very unsystematic.

Adjustments by natural selection

We now interpret these differences as adaptations to local conditions after our spread across Africa and the rest of the world. In the new residential areas, those genes that gave better adaptation to the environment were better distributed.

Through natural selection, humans adapted to life on the high plateaus, in extremely cold or tropical regions. A broad nose in the humid jungle, a narrow nose that stops evaporation on the dry savannah or a dark skin that protects against the strong UV radiation in the tropics… people gradually adapted to the different habitats. However, not all external characteristics are so easily explained from relationships with the environment. For example, the darkest Africans live around the equator, where the jungle shields the sun.

Despite the large spread of groups of people, contact remained through population movements, trade, the deployment of armies and, of course, our 'pacifist' wanderlust. We have therefore remained one species:we can reproduce with each other all over the world.

Prejudice

In Europe people were familiar with dark Africans from an early age. Egypt had black pharaohs and valued the Nubian warriors. In the early Christian period, however, black people became allegorical for 'sin' and 'the devil'. But in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the black queen of Sheba, and Caspar, one of the three wise men from the East, were loved by the Christians. At that time, Saint Maurice was also immortalized in a statue in the Magdeburg Cathedral as a dark crusader.

Then the image flipped. The claim that inequality was God-given justified colonialism and the slave trade. A verse from the Bible book of Genesis tells of Ham, who was cursed, as was his son Canaan, for seeing his drunken father Noah naked. As punishment they had dark offspring. Such scriptures were used to support the belief that the black African slaves were inferior beings.

From the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the biblical texts were no longer rigidly adhered to. They distanced themselves somewhat from the old, dogmatic methodology, leaving room for their own observations. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the anatomist Petrus Camper studied skulls of people of different ethnic backgrounds and those of great apes. He played a major role in the discussion at the time about a possible relationship between man and ape.

Linea facialis

Camper argued that blacks were also people, closely related to whites, so they did not arise from crosses between humans and orangutans, as many thought at the time. He did assume that blacks are born white and only then become dark. After migration to Europe they would lose their pigment again after a few generations. Skin color was therefore not a 'racial' characteristic, Camper thought. He called whites 'white Moors'. He also thought it was unimportant whether Adam and Eve had been white or dark; a burning issue at the time.

Camper drew up rules about the proportions of the human body. He introduced the linea facialis to numerically represent the protrusion of the lower half of the face. Although he spoke out clearly against the perceived superiority of white people, and also opposed slavery, his face has been abused for generations to defend slavery and racism.

Gay sapiens

After Carl Linnaeus classified plant and animal species in his Systema naturae, in the tenth edition of that work in 1758 he also included the species Homo sapiens on. He distinguished – partly based on the ancient element theory – four geographical varieties:white (albus), optimistic Europeans, yellow (furidus) melancholic Asians, black (niger) phlegmatic Africans and red (rufus) irascible Indians.

The Göttingse anatomist Blumenbach based his classification, in addition to geography, on the pigmentation of skin, hair and eye and on body measurements. After reading the travelogue about James Cook's voyage to the South Seas, he introduced a fifth variety. He spoke of the Caucasian or white race, the Mongoloid or yellow race, the Malay or brown race, the Ethiopian or black race, including the sub-Saharan Africans, and the American or red race.

After personally meeting Africans, Blumenbach returned to his earlier, rather caricatured, description of the black race. From then on he praised their excellent talents and mental powers. He also pointed to gradual transitions between the groups, and stated that the inhabitants of Africa differ more from each other than from Europeans; facts that would be advanced two centuries later as a strong argument against the concept of race.

Intersections

In North America, mixing whites with Indians or black slaves was strictly forbidden. At the same time, in Central and South America, after the founding of the colonies, mixing with the local Indians was encouraged. Children of various combinations of mixed parenting were given names such as Mestizo (European ú Indian), Mulat (European ú African), Morisco (European ú Mulatto) or Canbujo (Chinese ú Indian).

In Suriname it is mainly the Creoles who have mixed with Europeans, Jews, Chinese and to a lesser extent with Hindustani, Javanese and Indians. That medley is now called 'City Creoles'. On the other hand, there are a number of Native American tribes and Woodland Negroes who have never mixed. They live by the rivers in the jungle.

Blumenbach was convinced that Adam and Eve had been fair-skinned. Darker offspring, in that view, were created by poor nutrition and environment. This would allow a 'return' to a white appearance.

In the eighteenth century, the philosopher of faith Johann Herder rejected the rigid concept of race of his teacher Kant and emphatically concluded that races as such do not exist. Yet race remained a much-described topic. For example, British Prime Minister Disraeli wrote in the nineteenth century:“Everything is race, there is no other truth.” Usually at that time Cuvier's tripartite division 'Caucasian', 'Negroid' and 'Mongoloid' was quoted, later 'modernized' to 'European', 'African' and 'Asian'. But in addition there were many other classifications, such as 'straight-haired' and 'curly-haired'. Sometimes as many as four hundred breeds were distinguished.

Measurement of man

In an attempt to distinguish groups of people, objective biometrics gradually became more important. Fixed measuring points on the body were described and the measurements were mapped out with special, standardized equipment. This led to a separate branch of science:phrenology. In doing so, skull measurement and mind exploration were linked.

A pioneer in this field was the German physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828). He moved his field of activity from the anatomical laboratory to so-called madhouses and prisons, where he observed people with special drives, tendencies and talents. He had them tell at length about their good and bad qualities. He linked that data to skull measurements. On this basis he arrived at a description of more than five thousand characters in relation to skulls, all of which he carefully felt and studied. He described, among other things, a 'language talent' and a 'mathematics talent'.

He also related the shape of the skull to the profession of the person concerned:a simple seamstress had a round head with a low forehead, a learned doctor an elongated head with a high forehead. In men, he found typical skull nodules that indicated combativeness, determination and intelligence, while in women he assigned affection, childlikeness and similar qualities to other nodules.

By associating the shape and contents of the skull with certain character traits, it was believed that criminals could also be recognized by their appearance. Criminal anthropology later emerged from this, with the Italian psychiatrist Lombroso (1835–1909) as its great exponent.

The Swedish researcher Anders Adolf Retzius introduced the skull or head index in 1842:the ratio of the greatest width and greatest length of the skull. A high index was called brachycephalic or brachycephalic, dolichocephalic.

Around the time Darwin came up with his groundbreaking publications on the innovative concept of evolution, the first fossils of Neanderthals were found in 1856. This stimulated research into the origin of our own ancestors. Doctors started measuring old bones next to their practice. They compared narrow skulls from early medieval Frisian mounds with the round skulls from Zeeland.

Since that time, the skull compass has become indispensable for describing excavated skeletal material. Body measurements and pigmentation in living people were also investigated. This resulted in typological terms such as Frisian, Gaul and Celt. Behind that typology was the implicit and rigid assumption that a race would be a static entity.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Zeeland physician De Man exclusively studied Protestants, because he considered both Roman Catholics and Jews to be foreign elements. He paid a lot of attention to bone material from the Zuiderzee Islands. Due to the isolated location at the time, a different development was expected. For example, was the strange flattening of Marken's skulls an indication of influences from the Germanic Teutons, or maybe even a relic of the Neanderthals? The anatomist Barge came up with a more logical explanation in 1912:it was deformations caused by the tight-fitting traditional cap that was worn on Marken by both little boys and girls, while the skull was still growing.

Around 1900, the anatomist Louis Bolk classified the Dutch according to the typology:blond, blue-eyed brachycephalic Saxons, blond, blue-eyed but mesocephalic Frisians and dark, brachychephale Alpine types in the south of our country. A quarter of a century later, however, the rigid typology became more and more taboo; after all, almost no one turned out to fit exactly within a category.