Carleton Stevens Coon: 1904-1981

[Waarnemer]

Carleton Stevens Coon: 1904-1981
by EDWARD E. HUNT, JR.

After a distinguished and eventful career, Carleton S. Coon died on June 3, 1981 at his home in West Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was the Viking Medalist in Physical Anthropology in 1951, and president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. He was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts on June 23,1904, the descendant of a Cornishman who settled there in the 1830s. Carleton acquired a lifelong fascination with foreign lands and ancient history at the feet of his blind grandfather, who had been a great traveller and was a gifted teller of tales. His next blind bardic exemplar was Homer, when he read the Iliad in the original Greek as a student at Phillips Academy, Andover. By then, he was also teaching himself Egyptian hieroglyphics and archaeology. As a Harvard freshman, he began1961-63.
more formal studies of classics and Egyptology, but as a sophomore, he took a graduate course in English composition under the celebrated Charles T. Copeland. “Copey” told him that Cornishmen have a natural gift for writing, and Coon went on to become a prime example. In the same year, he took a course in anthropology under Earnest A. Hooton. From then on, Coon’s career was set in archaeology, ethnology, and physical anthropology. Most of his field work, and his military heroism in World War 11, took place in the Mediterranean lands. He earned the Ph.D. from Harvard in1928, and taught there with a wartime interruption until 1948, when he moved to the University of Pennsylvania. His war record in North Africa, Corsica, and Italy was full of Homeric exploits of guile and daring, for which he earned the Legion of Merit. In 1955, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1963 he retired to West Gloucester, where he continued a productive life of writing and travel. Strenuous field work was a hallmark of his career, and he particularly relished the company of armed and belligerent tribesmen. From 1924 to 1928 he lived among the rebellious Riffians of Morocco. In 1929-1930 he walked among the winter shows of Albania, measuring and studying the warlike Ghegs. In 1933-1934, he worked in Ethiopia and Southern Arabia. In 1939 and 1947 he excavated caves near Tangier in Morocco. In 1951 he dug five more cave sites in Iran, and also worked in Afghanistan and Syria. In 1959 he went to Tierra del Fuego to learn how the Fuegian Indians produced enough body heat to survive with little clothing in a cold and windy climate. In 1962 he found one of the two important premodern crania in the cave of Jebel Ighud, Morocco, and in 1965 after his retirement, he excavated a cave at Yengema, Sierra Leone. Coon was a very productive author of novels, poetry, and autobiography, but the chief aim of his career was to make sense out of human history for laymen and scholars alike. Toward this end, he wrote very scholarly and imaginative works on human cultures, culture history, and the history and adaptations of human races. Eliot Chapple and he wrote Principles of Anthropology (1942,1978), an enduring classic based on the conception that the rhythms and intensity of human social interaction form a scientific basis for cultural anthropology. Coon’s wide knowledge of the Islamic world led him to write Caravan: the Story of the Middle East (1951, 1958). Since the mid-nineteenth century, many writers, including the ethnologist Leslie White, have held that cultural evolution is intimately bound to the capture and use of environmental energy. Coon elaborated this thesis with characteristic skill in his The Story ofMan (1953,1962). In The Seven Caves (1957) he tells how he and his colleagues dug up the remains of early human groups in Africa and the Middle East. Coon greatly admired the independence and self-reliance of the simplest of human societies, and expressed these feelings in his book The Hunting Peoples (1971). This volume is based on his lecture notes, and faithfully reflects his bardic eloquence in the classroom. Coon’s major impact on physical anthropology, aside from local studies, came from four influential works. The first, The Races ofEurope (1939), was a totally new version of an earlier book by W. Z. Ripley (1899) with the same title. Coon achieved a remarkable synthesis of culture history and physical anthropology, interpreting the evolution of Caucasoids even as far from Europe as Central Asia, Arabia and Ethiopia. Even though European prehistory today looks quite different from Coon’s understanding of it, his book is still quoted with respect by modern workers in the field. This volume contains many themes that Coon reworked later in life. He believed that many human populations have evolved for millennia in situ, so that even today, Neanderthal genes persist in modern Europeans. Furthermore, when evolution has been slow, ancient physical types persist. For example, many individuals in Western Norway and Ireland still resemble the Europeans of the Upper Paleolithic. Coon’s second book, written with S. M. Garn and J. B. Birdsell (1950), was entitled Races: a Study of the Problems of Race Formation in Man. This work took up a very old idea that human racial variations are adaptations to different environments -especially climates. This book for the first time established this principle on a strong scientific foundation. Indeed, Races was a major landmark in the emergence of the “new” physical anthropology (Hunt, 1982). The third volume, The Origin of Races (1962), appeared just before Coon retired. It elaborates on a model of racial evolution from Franz Weidenreich (1947) in the form of a lattice
of verticals and diagonals. The verticals represent the evolution of each race in situ, and the diagonals represent gene flow between them. Both Weidenreich and Coon believed in the slow evolution of some races and the rapid transformation of others, but Coon was unimpressed with the diagonals, and thought that each race evolved largely on its own, secure in its private zoogeographic realm in the Old World. Coon then lacked the data that we now have on the likely origin of Homo erectus in, Africa, but emphasized the spread of this species into many parts of the Old World early in the Middle Pleistocene. He believed that in Eurasia, Homo erectus evolved early into

Homo sapiens

through an increase in brain size, but this change came much later in the black Congoids of Africa and the black Australoids then living in Southeast Asia and Indone sia. Coon also espoused an ancient Aristotelian doctrine of linear rank in at least some domains of the living world, notably human races. Plate XXXII in the Origin depicts the alpha of CARLETON STEVENS COON:1904-1981 241 human evolution as a large-brained Chinese male anthropologist, and the omega as a smallbrained female Australian aborigine. Although the concept of linear hierarchy was almost universal in the eighteenth century, even Lamarck (1809) attacked it when he showed that a single scale of rank cannot fit a phylogenetic bush, and this principle also applies to human races. The Origin of Races aroused both lavish praise and severe criticism. Its depth of scholarship and imagination were generally acclaimed. Despite Coon’s stand in favor of equality of opportunity for all races in the United States, he was accused of racism and sexism in his research by many critics. In my opinion, his concept of racial rank did not add to his stature as a scholar. Looking back today on the Origin, I believe that his reconstructions of racial history in Asia and the Pacific will hold up better in the future than his efforts in Europe and Africa. The fourth volume, The Living Races of Man (1965), was a close collaboration between Coon and myself. We shared our libraries and the resources of Harvard University to produce a book that was close to the realities of physiological adaptations in human populations. This book stirred up far less protest than did the Origin of Races. The bibliography at the end of this essay includes a list of writings cited in the text, a few historically important comments by other authors, and Coon’s major literary and scientific publications. Late in life, he began a review of what he considered to be the intellectual characteristics of human races (Coon, 1982). Alongside this undertaking, he published his annotated diary of his extraordinary exploits in World War II (Coon, 1980). One of his final works is a superb autobiography (Coon, 1981), which ends with a timely farewell quotation from the Iliad. Carleton Coon was an American patriot, a Celtic bard, a Homeric warrior, and a remarkably gifted anthropologist and writer. His many friends will sorely miss him.