Post by Graeme on Feb 2, 2004 8:49:51 GMT -5
I am annoyed at the reliance of the works of Coon in racial classification. The man was born in 1904 which means that everyone who influence him, his teachers, parents, the books he read, everyone and everything derived from the 19 th century. A lot of what he thought and wrote is out of date. I hate the pictures he used to illustrate racial types. The Brunn looks brutish, the Borreby looks apelike, the Alpine looks like an imbecile, the East Baltic looks like a thug, the Dinaric looks like a Rom and so on.
Coon deliberately chose freaky looking individuals to represent racial subtypes. Why include people of mixed race such the Ladogan or non European people as representatives of European racial types. Yemenis are not Mediterraneans or European looking at all. The Irishman with the frizzy hair used as a Keltic subtype of the Nordic is ridiculous. He is not Nordic in feature at all. Having frizzy red hair does not make him pass.
Coon's work is skewed pro Northwest European and anti Southern European. There is a world of difference between a Sicilian, a Libyan, a Yemeni and any South Asian. No "blond" Rifian or Afghani looks European. They look Berber or Afghani whatever their supposed hair colour.
People today are taller and heavier than their parents, grandparents or other forebears. Most Italians are not the small people mentioned by Coon. Most Italians are medium to heavily built not gracile, slender hermaphrodites. People today are better fed, clothed and work less strenuously than in the past. Exposure to the intense sunlight doesn't happen much today, hence people are less tanned. In Coon's day most Greeks, Italians and other people living near the Mediterranean Sea worked outdoors on small parcels of land as subsistence farmers or fishermen. Of course they would be tanned brown by the sun.
Head shape has been getting broader over time. At one time Europe was inhabited by longheads. The evolutionary trend is towards roundheadedness. In the past most people died before reproducing, so we modern Europeans come from a small group of Europeans who managed to survive and reproduce. The skeletal remains so often used to illustrate racial type likely belong to people who did not contribute their genes to us. The ancient people had teeth that met in a level bite and used sounds like th in their languages. The th sound has been superseded in most languages in Europe as the overbite has taken over. It is harder to pronounce those sounds now than it was in the past. My immigrant European parents never learnt to pronounce either of the th sounds used in English despite living in Australia for most of their lives.
By the way I tried to get one of Coon's books from my local library, the Sydney City Library in Australia, and found that it was being "weeded".
Coon deliberately chose freaky looking individuals to represent racial subtypes. Why include people of mixed race such the Ladogan or non European people as representatives of European racial types. Yemenis are not Mediterraneans or European looking at all. The Irishman with the frizzy hair used as a Keltic subtype of the Nordic is ridiculous. He is not Nordic in feature at all. Having frizzy red hair does not make him pass.
Coon's work is skewed pro Northwest European and anti Southern European. There is a world of difference between a Sicilian, a Libyan, a Yemeni and any South Asian. No "blond" Rifian or Afghani looks European. They look Berber or Afghani whatever their supposed hair colour.
People today are taller and heavier than their parents, grandparents or other forebears. Most Italians are not the small people mentioned by Coon. Most Italians are medium to heavily built not gracile, slender hermaphrodites. People today are better fed, clothed and work less strenuously than in the past. Exposure to the intense sunlight doesn't happen much today, hence people are less tanned. In Coon's day most Greeks, Italians and other people living near the Mediterranean Sea worked outdoors on small parcels of land as subsistence farmers or fishermen. Of course they would be tanned brown by the sun.
Head shape has been getting broader over time. At one time Europe was inhabited by longheads. The evolutionary trend is towards roundheadedness. In the past most people died before reproducing, so we modern Europeans come from a small group of Europeans who managed to survive and reproduce. The skeletal remains so often used to illustrate racial type likely belong to people who did not contribute their genes to us. The ancient people had teeth that met in a level bite and used sounds like th in their languages. The th sound has been superseded in most languages in Europe as the overbite has taken over. It is harder to pronounce those sounds now than it was in the past. My immigrant European parents never learnt to pronounce either of the th sounds used in English despite living in Australia for most of their lives.
By the way I tried to get one of Coon's books from my local library, the Sydney City Library in Australia, and found that it was being "weeded".