Gavin Long, the alleged killer of three police officers in Baton Rouge on July 17 reportedly identified himself with the Washitaw Nation, a group that claims ancient African sovereignty over a portion of North America based on their misinterpretation of archaeological data.

Last night, Congressman Steve King (Republican, Iowa), apparently disgusted that someone would ask why there are so few non-whites in evidence at the GOP convention in Cleveland, posed a question that has been a favorite white supremacist attack line since white supremacists invented white supremacists:

“This whole ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

Back in May I wrote this post about famous racist anthropologist Ernst Haeckel's ideas about human evolution and the lost continent of Lemuria.  In the late 1800's, Haeckel proposed that some kind of "speechless men or ape-like men" was the common ancestor of the various human populations that he thought were actually different species. Haeckel used the term Pithecanthropi (literally "ape men") to refer to his proto-humans.

I found it interesting that Haeckel was using the term Pithecanthropi years before it was used to name the "Java Man" fossils found by Eugene Dubois in Indonesia in 1891.  As best I can tell, Haeckel coined "Pithecanthropi"  to describe his hypothetical, speechless proto-human "missing link" between apes and humans (the earliest use of the term I can find is in the 1876 edition of History of Creation). Haeckel invented Pithecanthropi to describe something that he thought should have existed according to his model of human evolution, rather than something that could be shown to have actually existed based on fossil evidence. Pithecanthropus was a pre-construction rather than a re-construction.

Haeckel's manufactured genus was so important to his ideas about human evolution that artist Gabriel Max gave Haeckel a drawing of a family of Pithecanthropus for his 60th birthday in 1894. The picture displays the human-like differentiated hands and feet that Haeckel presumed would have been present.

(An aside: look closely at the female's right foot -- it looks to me like she has a divergent big toe.  It's interesting that available fossil evidence [such as Little Foot] demonstrate that Australopithecines retained a somewhat opposable big toe like non-human apes.  A grasping toe is also present in the the 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, which may or may not be a human ancestor. There is no evidence that I know of which suggests that Homo erectus had a foot significantly different from modern humans). 

So why did Eugene Dubois name his fossils Pithecanthropus erectus?  Was the choice of name an endorsement of Haeckel's ideas?

Yes, apparently.

Dubois wasn't a student of Haeckel's, but was apparently significantly influenced by Haeckel's ideas both in terms of the notion that there should be a "missing link" between apes and humans and fossil evidence for that creature could likely be found in tropical Asia. Dubois' decision to name the fossils he found in Indonesia Pithecanthropus is not a coincidence but a direct reflection of his appreciation for Haeckel's ideas about human evolution.

It seems that Dubois' decision to look for the "missing link" in southeast Asia wasn't just some random gamble based on an original idea he had that humans were descended from orangutans: it was inspired by Haeckel's writings. The biography of Dubois on Talk Origins doesn't mention a connection between Dubois' ideas and those of Haeckel. The New World Encyclopedia entry about Dubois also doesn't mention Haeckel (but  Dubois' Wikipedia entry does). Pat Shipman's 2002 biography of Dubois (The Man Who Found the Missing Link), which I have not yet read, also discusses the connection between Haeckel and Dubois.

I think we could do a better job of confronting the history of racism in our discipline. While our current ideas about human evolution may ultimately be unaffected by whatever was in Dubois' head when he found the first fossils of what we now classify as Homo erectus in Indonesia, it isn't appropriate to try to scrub the "discovery" narrative clean of its historical and cultural context. I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but it's interesting that so many online sources of information about Dubois don't mention what looks like a fairly clear relationship between his career path and Haeckel's ideas.

I've got a blogging backlog.  It's the usual story of more things to write about than time to write about them. Before #Swordgate took the air out of the room, I was working on understanding how modern belief in giants was tied to Young Earth Creationism and indigenous American religious movements (see this post on Seventh Day Adventists and the Deluge Society).  Tied to my interest in giants, I had started dabbling in understanding how the remains of Gigantopithecus (an actual animal that lived in east Asia) are incorporated into narratives about giants and Bigfoot (see this post about the lack of postcranial remains and this post about tooth size). I've been spending more of my blogging time writing about my Archaic research (i.e., the Kirk Project and, lately, an effort to compile a massive Eastern Woodlands radiocarbon database) than fringe stuff lately.  There isn't time to keep all the balls in the air at once, but I intend to keep talking about all these things and more as I have the opportunity over the summer.

This post about Ernst Haeckel and the lost continent of Lemuria is one I started a long time ago. I'm going to wrap it up and post it to get it out of my "draft" box.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) would easily make any reasonable list of the Top Ten Most Racist Anthropologists. A biologist by training, Haeckel regarded the various "races" of humans as being distinct species that evolved from some hypothetical, pre-language "primaeval ape-man" (Homo primeginius). He arranged his twelve living species of humans hierarchically. Unsurprisingly, Caucasians (including Indo-Germans) were at the top of the heap.  While Haeckel was clearly a racist, it is not clear exactly how his ideas contributed to the rise of Nazism (see this essay for one treatment).

In Volume II of the 1887 English edition of The History of Creation  (a German version is here) Haeckel laid out his evolutionary taxonomy of humans. He proposed a basic division between "straight-haired men" and "woolly-haired men,' the common ancestor of which was speechless "ape-like men," or Pithecanthrops. In other words, Haeckel thought the languages of "straight-haired men" and "woolly-haired men" emerged independently after these different species of humans diverged. While he was clearly thinking in evolutionary rather than creationist terms, Haeckel's (1887:293-294) description of the pre-language divergence of difference "species" of humans resonates with a polygenist perspective on human variation:

"These Ape-like men, or Pithecanthropi, very probably existed towards the end of the Tertiary period. They originated out of the Man-like Apes, or Anthropoides, by becoming completely habituated to an upright walk, and by the corresponding stronger differentiation of both pairs of legs. The fore hand of the Anthropoides became the human hand, their hinder hand became a foot for walking. Although these Ape-like Men must not merely by the external formation of their bodies, but also by their internal mental development, have been much more akin to real Men than the Man-like Apes could have been, yet they did not possess the real and chief characteristic of man, namely, the articulate human language of words, the corresponding development of a higher consciousness, and the formation of ideas. The certain proof that such Primaeval Men without the power of speech, or Ape-like Men, must have preceded men possessing speech, is the result arrived at by an inquiring mind from comparative philology (from the "comparative anatomy "of language), and especially from the history of the development of language In every child ("glottal ontogenesis ") as well as in every nation ("glottal phylogenesis ").
     . . . As, according to the unanimous opinion of most eminent philologists, all human languages are not derived from a common primaeval language, we must assume a polyphyletic origin of language, and in accordance with this a polyphyletic transition from speechless Ape-like Men to Genuine Men."

Notice that Haeckel's family tree classifies the ancestor of humans as an Asian ape closely related to gibbons and orangutans. Haeckel was writing at a time when fossil evidence of human evolution was still incredibly thin: the few Neanderthal remains that had been found in Europe were not well understood, and Eugene Dubois' (1891) discovery of fossils in Java (now classified as Homo erectus) was still in the future. In short, there was no consensus about what the fossils of a human ancestor would look like or where in the world they should be found. In this vacuum of fossil evidence, Haeckel relied on the study of linguistics of living peoples to reconstruct human evolution.

If all of this sounds rather quaint and harmless, read on in Haeckel's treatise to understand the implications of his understanding of linguistic and physical variation among human populations (1887:307-310): 

"[The Ulotrichi, or woolly-haired men] are on the whole at a much lower stage of development, and more like apes, than most of the Lissotrichi, or straight-haired men. The Ulotrichi are incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development, even under the favourable conditions of adaptation now offered to them in the United States of North America. No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important " history.""

In Haeckel's view, differences in language clearly reflect innate biological differences in the cognitive capacities of different human groups, and, therefore, their actual degree of humanity. That is just about as racist as it gets.

Wile Haeckel saw linguistic variation in human populations as polyphyletic (marking development since the divergence of humans species from a common ancestor), he recognized that the human lineage must ultimately be monophyletic (descended from a common ancestor) and therefore have some geographic place of origin. Turning to the question of where in the world the common ancestor of humans originated, Haeckel (1887:326) rejects the existing continents as the location of "Paradise" (i.e. "the cradle of the human race") and proposes that the lost continent of Lemuria makes the most sense: 

"But there are a number of circumstances (especially chorological facts) which suggest that the primaeval home of man was a continent now sunk below the surface of the Indian Ocean, which extended along the south of Asia, as it is at present (and probably in direct connection with it), towards the east, as far as further India and the Sunda Islands; towards the west, as far as Madagascar and the south-eastern shores of Africa. We have already mentioned that many facts in animal and vegetable geography render the former existence of such a south Indian continent very probable. (Compare vol i. p. 361.) Sclater has given this continent the name of Lemuria, from the Semi-apes which were characteristic of it. By assuming this Lemuria to have been man's primaeval home, we greatly facilitate the explanation of the geographical distribution of the human species by migration." 

At the time Haeckel was writing, the idea that there was a lost continent beneath the Indian Ocean made a lot of sense.  While the 19th century concept of Lemuria (named after the lemurs of Madagascar) usefully explained the discontinuous distributions of some plants and animals, 20th century seafloor exploration and knowledge of plate tectonics showed that no such sunken landmass exists.  There was no Lemuria, and the existence of such a place cannot be used to credibly frame ideas about human evolution and, consequently, the meanings of biological and linguistic variability among human populations.

This falsification of the idea of Lemuria is science in action. As racist as Haeckel was, I bet that he still would have adjusted his ideas about human evolution in the face of direct fossil evidence or the knowledge that there was no such thing as Lemuria. In regards the "paradise" of Lemuria, Haeckel (1887:325) acknowledged that

"I must premise the remark that, in the present state of our anthropological knowledge, any answer to this question must be regarded only as a provisional hypothesis."   

In the absence of direct evidence, it is possible to construct multiple narratives to explain the past and what it has to do with the present. The lack of direct evidence allows many mutually-exclusive ideas to be simultaneously regarded as credible.  Science works by developing lines of evidence that allows some of those ideas to be tested and potentially falsified. This is why Lemuria was a fine idea in the late 1800's but is a nonsense one now.  And this is why what we now know about human evolution and variation shows Haeckel's ideas about different human "species" as the inherently racist constructs that they are.  

Science works by letting facts kill ideas. Lemuria went down in smoke a long time ago, as did the idea that there are deep biological/cognitive differences between modern human populations. If you are holding on to either of these ideas, you should ask yourself why.

The concept of a Dinaric race was expanded upon by Nazi eugenicist Hans F. K. Günther in his 1927 book The Racial Elements of European History. Günther's description of the physical characteristics of the Dinaric race echoes that of Deniker, emphasizing tall stature (about 5'8" for males), brachycephaly, brown skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. I've clipped some examples of Dinarics from Günther's book so you can see what he thought the "race" looked like.

To the physical descriptions of the races of Europe, Günther added an assessment of their mental characteristics: 

"The Dinaric man is characterized by a warm feeling for nature, a strong love of the home, and a spirit of creativeness in fashioning the surroundings to be the ordered expression of himself in houses, implements, customs, and forms of speech. He does not, however, turn his gifts so much to the vaster undertakings, to leadership in the most varied spheres of life, or to restless progress and strenuous competition. He lives more in the present than does the provident, foreseeing Nordic. The boldness of the Dinaric is rather one of bodily achievements; a real spiritual urge to conquest, such as often characterizes Nordic men, seems to be rarer. Characteristic of the Dinaric is an inclination to sudden outbursts, to quick anger, and to combativeness -- characteristics, however, which but stand out from the general level of a disposition that is on the whole good-tempered, cheerful, and friendly. But it is not mere chance that the predominantly Dinaric south-east of the German-speaking area (like the East with its East Baltic strain) is marked by a particularly high percentage of convictions for dangerous bodily wounding, and in general by a relatively high percentage of criminal convictions.

The Dinaric nature has a range of development decidedly narrower in every direction than that of the Nordic. The signs are wanting of any great mental acumen, or of stern determination. The spiritual outlook is narrower, though the will may be as strong. On the whole the Dinaric race represents a stock which is not seldom somewhat uncouth, with a rough cheerfulness, or even wit, and is easily stirred to enthusiasm; it has a gift for coarse repartee and vivid description, showing a decided knowledge of mankind and histrionic powers as a racial endowment. Business capacity, too, seems to be not rare. The gift for music, above all for song, is particularly pronounced. The predominantly Dinaric Alpine district is where German folk-songs most flourish. The gift of tongues, too, would seem more frequent in the Dinaric race. The sociableness of this race is a rough and noisy one; as between man and man it is generally sincere and upright. For mental capacity I would put the Dinaric race second among the races of Europe."

So there you have it:  the Dinaric race has a lot going for it but, according to a future Nazi (Günther didn't join the Nazi party until 1932), just doesn't quite stack up to the Nordics.  I'll bet you didn't see that one coming.

In his first chapter, Günther provided an explicit definition of race:

"A race shows itself in a human group which is marked off from every other human group through its own proper combination of bodily and mental characteristics, and in turn produces only its like."

He followed this definition with a clear statement that "Ethnology yields hardly any example of such a true-breeding human group." In reality, Günther said, there is a lot of mixture between the races.  In the eyes of the Nazis, that obviously sets up a problem for the "best" of the races (the Nordic race), as any mixture with other, inferior races dilutes its qualities.

Anyway, another person worth mentioning on the Dinaric race issue is Carleton Coon, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist perhaps most infamous for proclaiming as late as 1962 that the "five races" of humans had formed prior to the evolution of Homo sapiens.   In Chapter XII of his (1939) book The Races of Europe, Coon gave his conclusions on the Dinaric "race:"

"Dinaricism is not a quality pertaining to a single race, it is a condition. This condition is common in Europe; it is also common in western Asia. Furthermore, it is not confined to the white racial stock; the principle of hybrid inheritance which produces Dinarics in Europe has also produced Papuans in New Guinea, the Arii aristocrats in Polynesia, and many American Indians."

Look carefully at what Coon is saying in that passage:  even if you can identify a Dinaric "type" (based on skull morphology, for example), that type doesn't have any historical meaning.  "Dinaric" skulls are found in many parts of the world in populations that are not related to one another. 

My take on all of this is that the originator of the concept of a "Dinaric race" (Deniker), Nazi racial scientists (Günther), and one of the last American physical anthropologists who openly embraced racial classification (Coon) all agree that the term "Dinaric race" doesn't really describe a single people, or even mark a population that has a single origin. This is in direct contradiction to Zimmerman's argument that Dinaric skulls are "unique" and therefore can be used as a marker of a distinct population (and a giant one, to boot).  I very seriously doubt Zimmerman knows something about the "Dinaric race" that Deniker, Günther, and Coon did not. 
Günther
So how do these brachycephalic, noisy, 5'8" peoples spread across southern Europe become both biblical giants and the constructors of earthen mounds in eastern North America?  How do the people of the Balkans become the Amorites, and how do the Amorites get to Kentucky and Ohio? 

A Dinaric Skull in the Near East?

Zimmerman attempts to connect the "Dinaric race" to biblical giants by saying that a Dinaric skull was found in Damascus, near where Og and the Amorites lived (see the quote above).  He doesn't provide a reference in the page I quoted, but elsewhere he says that a Dinaric skull "near the Damascus Gate at Jerusalem" was "discovered by Prof. Retzius, who described it in the Proceeding of the Royal Academy of Science, 1902." 

There are a couple of errors here, and a bit of sleight of hand. 

First is the location: note that it's the Damascus Gate at Jerusalem, not Damascus as Zimmerman says above. 

Second, I found the original publication by searching on a sentence that Zimmerman quotes, and it's not a 1902 document.  The passage he quotes is originally from an 1879 book titled The North Americans of Antiquity by John Thomas Short.  In the section on "Head Flattening," that book describes a discussion of an artificially deformed skull from Austria described by "Prof. Retzius" in "The Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Stockholm in 1844" (that's a reference line within the work, not the reference of the work itself, and it's 1844, not 1902).  Here is an 1855 paper by Retzius describing that skull and other artificially deformed crania.

Third, the deformed skull from near the Damascus Gate, which seems to be key to Zimmerman's attempt to connect the "Dinaric race" to the Amorites, was discovered in 1856 by J. Hudson Barclay and described in an 1859 paper by J. A. Meigs titled "Description of a deformed, fragmentary human skull : found in an ancient quarry-cave at Jerusalem : with an attempt to determine, by its configuration alone, the ethnical type to which it belongs."  That paper does not illustrate the skull, and if you search for the term "Dinaric" within it you'll come up empty (Deniker, the originator of the term, wasn't even born until 1852).  If you look at that paper, you'll see a lot of discussion trying to figure out the "ethnical type" to which the skull belongs.  It's fragmentary, undated, artificially deformed, and not a "Dinaric skull." So much for that.

Maybe there's some other component to Zimmerman's argument that the "Dinaric race" is related to the Amorite "giants" of the Near East.  As far as I can tell, however, the notion seems to be based primarily on a misreferenced, misunderstood paper about an artificially-deformed, fragmentary skull that was published decades before the concept of a "Dinaric race" was even formalized.  If so, it's nonsense. 

"Dinaric" Skulls in the Eastern Woodlands?

With the link between the "Dinaric race" and giants severed, identifying "Dinaric" skulls in the Eastern Woodlands becomes largely moot.  But it's an interesting part of the story and worth mentioning.

The crucial component of this part of Zimmerman's argument seems to be the description of Adena skeletal remains as "brachycephalic."  As discussed above, brachycephaly was one of the defining characteristics of the Dinaric "type."  Adena skeletal remains were described as brachycephalic by Charles Snow in the 1940s and 1950s, when the definition and identification of physical "types" was still popular in physical anthropology in the United States.  Many of the Adena skulls that Snow looked at were artificially deformed, heightening the impression of extreme brachycephaly.  Some of the Adena were also described as relatively tall, even up to 7' or so.

What the Giantologists Got Wrong

The equation here just doesn't add up at all. The Adena skulls are brachycephalic (enhanced by artificial cranial deformation), brachycephaly is one of the characteristics of the "Dinaric race" in Europe, there was an artificially-deformed skull discovered in the Near East in 1856, ergo the earthen monuments of eastern North America were constructed by biblical giants?  Is that the whole story?

If you detect a few missing connections in that line of reasoning, I'm right there with you.  How a racial category constructed around the 5'8" people of southern Europe became the link between Og of the Old Testament and the Adena is beyond me. It's silly.

I think the main rabbit hole in this case is the uncritical acceptance of the racial typologizing and classification that was a mainstay of anthropology in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  If you're going to embrace the same racial "science" as the Nazis, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure.  That's pretty obvious.  There's even a discussion on Stormfront (a white supremacist website) that complains that having writing about things like the "Dinaric race" on the forum "will make Stormfront a laughing stock."

The example of the "Dinaric race" should be a cautionary tale to anyone looking to use pre-World War II racial typologies to reconstruct population history, which is what Zimmerman attempts to do.  To anyone paying attention, the description of "Dinaricism" as "not a quality pertaining to a single race" by one of last prominent racist theorists in mainstream American anthropology (Coon) would seem to throw a bucket of cold water on the idea that a link between the populations of Europe and North America could be recognized based on the identification of "Dinaric" skulls. 

But I guess that's just another pesky detail (like the real story of the "Jerusalem skull)," and real giantologistis are not going let such trivia stand in the way of a good story.  The "good story," of course, is one we've heard before: it's the Myth of the Moundbuilders all over again (i.e., the notion that white people, not Native Americans, were responsible for building the earthen monuments of eastern North America).  What's new here is the attempt to use discredited racial "science" to somehow bridge the gaps of space and time between the New World and the Old, and between a "race of giants" and normal human variation.   Haphazardly invoking antiquated racial typologies doesn't make the case stronger.