Negroid

Negroid is a racial category used to describe people of sub-Saharan African origin. ^[1]

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.

Origin of the term

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]

Use in physical anthropology

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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 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. 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

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

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:

Criticism

Today, most scientists view human variation as distributed clinally, often without any sharp discontinuities. While acknowledging the existence of human variation among groups, anthropologists have abandoned the view that clearly delineated, discrete racial entities exist, since there often is considerable overlap in characteristics among the populations.^[14] Furthermore, in at least one study most of the variation in physical traits found was among individuals within the so-called racial groups.^[15]

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.^[16] 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.^[17] As Monatagu (1963) said,

Anti-racist activists such as Elizabeth Martinez have suggested that one reason the term is regarded as offensive is because while other races are identified by the geographical places where it was assumed those people most typical of their phenotype live (the Caucasus for those called Caucasoids and Mongolia for those called Mongoloids), Negroids were identified by their color (niger = black). Carleton Coon actually unwittingly solved this problem by positing in 1962 the existence of the Congoid race, named like the other races after those people regarded as being most typical of that race (in this case, after those residing in the Congo basin).

See also

• Caucasoid race
• Capoid race
• Mongoloid race
• Australoid race
• Africoid peoples

References