Negroid race

The Negroid race is an obsolete race category.

It was one of the three proposed "great races", further divided into subtypes, beside the now obsolete Caucasoid and Mongoloid races. The major population included in the category in the 19th century and early 20th century were the black people of sub-Saharan Africa.

Sometimes Australian Aboriginals, the Melanesians and Negritos were included in the Negroid race in popular anthropology and cartography. However, as early as 1870, Thomas Huxley suggested that the Australian Aborigines, the Negritos, the Melanesians as well as the Papuans (the inhabitants of New Guinea) should be referred to as a separate race known as the Australoid race. This had become general practice by the 1940s.

Polynesians have been seen as part Negroid due to the admixture of Australoid and Mongoloid characteristics.

The concept of the Negroid race originated with the typological method of racial classification and is still used by many anthropologists, especially physical anthropologists working in the forensic field of craniofacial anthropometry.

Carleton Stevens Coon rejected the notion of a unified Negroid race in his 1962 The Origin of Races, dividing the Black African populations into a Congoid race and a Capoid race.

Etymology

The term has its etymological roots in the Latin word niger (black), with the earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" in 1859. In modern use, the term is associated with "the division of mankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa".

Subraces

In the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, the traditional subraces of the Negroid race were regarded as being the Nilotic race, the Sudanic race (also called "West Africans", i.e., all those belonging the Niger-Congo peoples who are not Bantus), the Bantu race, the Pygmy race, and the Khoisan (always referred to as "Hottentots and Bushmen" before the 1960s) (the Khoisan by the 1960s became regarded as a separate race known as the Capoid race, as noted above).

Use in physical anthropology

Ashley Montagu lists "neotenous structural traits in which...Negroids differ from Caucasoids... flattish nose, flat root of the nose, narrower ears, narrower joints, frontal skull eminences, later closure of premaxillary sutures, less hairy, longer eyelashes, [and] cruciform pattern of second and third molars"

In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humans — Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans are divisible into broad sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology. Such classifications remain in use today in the fields of anthropology and forensics to help identify the ethnicity, lineage and origin of human remains.

Later extensions of the terminology, such as Carleton S. Coon's Origin of Races placed this theory in an evolutionary context — Coon divided the species homo sapiens into five groups, Caucasoid, Capoid, Congoid, Australoid, and Mongoloid, based on the timing of their evolution from homo erectus. Positing the Capoid race as a separate racial entity, and labeling the two major divisions of what he called the Congoid race as being the "African Negroes" and the "Pygmies", he divided indigenous Africans into these two distinct groups based on their date of origin, and loosened classification from mere appearance — however, this led to disagreement between approaches to dating divergence, and consequent conflicting results. Cavalli-Sforza also accepts this twofold division, pointing out that the Pygmies are have a very different genetic signature than other Black Africans, so they must have originally had their own now unknown language, but have since adopted the language of the Bantu peoples around them. Cavaill-Sforza does not accept as Coon did that each race evolved separately; he accepts the currently dominant paradigm, the Out of Africa theory, i.e. that all human beings are descended from small bands of people that migrated out of Africa beginning about 60,000 years ago.

Craniofacial anthropometry

In modern craniofacial anthropometry, Negroid describes features that typify skulls of Black people. These include a broad and round nasal cavity; no dam or nasal sill; Quonset hut-shaped nasal bones; notable facial projection in the jaw and mouth area (prognathism); a rectangular-shaped palate; a square or rectangular eye orbit shape; and large, megadontic teeth. Still widely used internationally in the identification of human remains, some have challenged its accuracy in different human populations which have developed in close proximity to one another and those of mixed ethnic heritage. For example, one recent study of ancient Nubian crania concluded: }}

Criticism

The term Negroid is commonly associated with notions of racial typology which are currently being challenged by some anthropologists; for modern usage it is generally associated with racial notions, and is discouraged, as it is potentially offensive. This mirrors the decline in usage of the term Negro, which fell out of favor following the campaigns of the American civil rights movement — the term Negro became associated with periods of legalized discrimination, and was rejected by African Americans during the 1960s for Black. As Monatagu (1963) said,

See also

Caucasoid race

Capoid race

Mongoloid race

Australoid race

References

Category:Historical definitions of race