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Negroid

 
Dictionary: Ne·groid   ('groid') pronunciation Anthropology.
adj.
Of or being a major human racial classification traditionally distinguished by physical characteristics such as brown to black pigmentation and often tightly curled hair and including peoples indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. See Usage Note at race1.

n.
A member of this racial classification.

[NEGR(O) + -OID.]


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WordNet: negroid
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Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The adjective has one meaning:

Meaning #1: characteristic of people traditionally classified as the Negro race


Wikipedia: Negroid
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Negrid types according to Meyers Blitz-Lexicon, published in 1932

Negroid is a racial category.[1] It was one of the three "great races", further divided into subtypes, in scientific racism, beside the Europid and the Mongoloid races. Populations included in the category were the black people of sub-Saharan Africa, the Australian Aboriginals, the Melanesian and Negrito populations of Southeast Asia and Oceania, and according to some authorities also the Dravidians.

The concept originated with the typological method of racial classification[2] and is still used by many anthropologists, especially physical anthropologists working in the forensic field of craniofacial anthropometry.

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

The term has its etymological roots in the Latin word niger (black), with the earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" in 1859.[3] In modern use, the term is associated with "the division of mankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa".[4]

Contents

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"[5]

In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humansCaucasoid, 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. For example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza freely uses the term in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes to distinguish between various groups that have inhabited and do inhabit Africa. [6]

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.[7][8] 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.[8][9] 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. [10]

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[11]; and large, megadontic teeth.[12] 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:

The assignment of skeletal racial origin is based principally upon stereotypical features found most frequently in the most geographically distant populations. While this is useful in some contexts (for example, sorting skeletal material of largely West African ancestry from skeletal material of largely Western European ancestry), it fails to identify populations that originate elsewhere and misrepresents fundamental patterns of human biological diversity.[13]

Criticism

The term Negroid is commonly associated with outdated notions of racial typology which have been widely discredited in scientific circles[1] — for modern usage it is generally associated with outdated racial notions, and is discouraged, as it is potentially offensive.[4] The term "Negroid" is still used in certain disciplines such as craniometry, epidemiology and forensic archaeology. Even in a medical context, some scholars have recommended that the term Negroid should be avoided in scientific writings because of its association with racism and race science.[14] 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.[4]

Coon's evolutionary approach was criticized on the basis that such "sorting criteria" do not (in general) produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames.[15] As Monatagu (1963) said,

The notion that five subspecies or geographic races of Homo erectus [...] "evolved independently into Homo sapiens not once but five times" at different times and in different places, seems to me a very far-fetched one. Coon has striven valiantly, to make out a case for this theory, but it simply does not square with the biological facts. Species and subspecies simply do not develop that way. The transmutation of one species into another is a very gradual process [...][9]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b O'Neil, Dennis (2007-07-03). "Modern Human Variation: Glossary of Terms". Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College. http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/glossary.htm. Retrieved 2007-11-06. 
  2. ^ O'Neil, Dennis. Palomar College. "Biological Anthropology Terms." 2006. May 13, 2007. [1]
  3. ^ Harper, Douglas (November 2001). "Online Etymological Dictionary". http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=negroid&searchmode=none. Retrieved 2007-11-06. 
  4. ^ a b c "Ask Oxford - Definition of Negroid". Oxford Dictionary of English. 2007. http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view=dict&freesearch=negroid&branch=13842570&textsearchtype=exact. Retrieved 2007-11-06. 
  5. ^ Montagu, Ashley Growing Young Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 1988 ISBN 089789166X
  6. ^ Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; and Piazza Alberto The History and Geography of Human Genes Princeton, New Jersey: 1994 Princeton University Press See section on "Africa" Pages 158-194
  7. ^ Jackson Jr., John (June 2001). "“In Ways Unacademical”: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races". Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2): 247–285. doi:10.1023/A:1010366015968. 
  8. ^ a b Keita, S.O.Y.; Rick A. Kittles (September 1987). "The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence". American Anthropologist 99 (3): 534–544. doi:10.1525/aa.1997.99.3.534. 
  9. ^ a b Dobzhansky, Theodosius; Ashley Montagu; C. S. Coon (1963). "Two Views of Coon's "Origin of Races" with Comments by Coon and Replies". Current Anthropology 4 (4): 360–367. doi:10.1086/200401. 
  10. ^ Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; and Piazza Alberto The History and Geography of Human Genes Princeton, New Jersey: 1994 Princeton University Press See section on "Africa" Pages 158-194
  11. ^ Forensic Anthropology - Ancestry
  12. ^ Brace CL, Tracer DP, Yaroch LA, Robb J, Brandt K, Nelson AR, Clines and clusters versus "race:" a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile, (1993), Yrbk Phys Anthropol 36:1–31, p.18
  13. ^ L’engle Williams, Frank; Robert L. Belcher, George J. Armelagos (April 2005). "Forensic Misclassification of Ancient Nubian Crania: Implications for Assumptions about Human Variation" (PDF). Current Anthropology 46 (2): 340–346. doi:10.1086/428792. http://monarch.gsu.edu/WebRoot$/fwilliams/CurrAnth%202005%20Williams%20et%202.pdf. Retrieved 2007-11-06. 
  14. ^ Agyemang, Charles; Raj Bhopal, Marc Bruijnzeels (2005). "Negro, Black, Black African, African Caribbean, African American or what? Labelling African origin populations in the health arena in the 21st century". Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59: 1014–1018. doi:10.1136/jech.2005.035964. PMID 16286485. http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/59/12/1014. Retrieved 2007-11-06. 
  15. ^ Carlson, David (September 1971). "Problems in Racial Geography". Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61 (3): 630–633. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1971.tb00812.x. 

Translations: Negroid
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Dansk (Danish)
adj. - negroid, negerlignende
n. - negroid

Nederlands (Dutch)
negroïde, zwarte persoon

Français (French)
adj. - négroïde
n. - négroïde

Deutsch (German)
adj. - negrid, negerartig
n. - Angehöriger der negriden Rasse, Negroider

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj., -
n. - νεγροειδής

Italiano (Italian)
negroide

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - negróide
n. - negróide

Русский (Russian)
негроидный, негроид

Español (Spanish)
adj. - negroide
n. - negroide, persona de raza negroide

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - negroid, negerliknande
n. - negroid

中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
黑人的, 类似黑人的, 黑人特有的, 黑人

中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 黑人的, 類似黑人的, 黑人特有的
n. - 黑人

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 흑인종과 관계가 있는, 흑인종과 비슷한, 흑인계의
n. - 흑인계 사람, 준흑인종

日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 黒色人種の
n. - 黒色人種

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(صفه) شبيه بالزنج ( بالنسبه للوجه او الانف الخ) (الاسم) الشخص الشبيه بالزنج‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮של כושים‬
n. - ‮כושי, תכונות גופניות של כושי: עור חום, שיער מקורזל, אף רחב וכו'‬


 
 
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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Negroid" Read more
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