Race, Evolution, and Behavior

Race and Racism in History 101
As also reported by the Islamic writers, Africans were perceived to have
great musical virtuosity in precision of timing and accuracy of pitch, whether
of voice or tuning of instruments. The native dances that the explorers witnessed
tended to be voluptuous, with obscene motions made to other dancers.
This was not true of ceremonial war dances, particularly those given by the
Zulus, where great discipline, order, sedateness, and regularity were to be
observed. The Zulus had been one of the greatest warrior tribes ever known in
Africa, creating a military empire from Zululand through Tanzania to the Congo
for much of the nineteenth century, until being defeated finally by the British
in 1879.
The Enlightenment
Europe's scientific revolution, begun with Galileo (1564-1642) and Newton
(1642-1727), produced profound and far-reaching changes. Science altered
in meaning from simply "knowledge" to "systematically formulated
knowledge, based on observation and experiment." It became, as never before,
necessary to "prove" the rules. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century
was characterized by belief in the power of human reason to comprehend
the natural world. The study of human nature and human differences was
brought within its ambit.
In the seventeenth century, as explorers discovered more and more about
varieties of ape and human, there was much confusion about the degree of
overlap. Some humans lived very simple lives as food gatherers, without knowledge
of agriculture. Some apes were able to be trained to eat dinner at a table.
It was possible to conjecture that apes were a lower form of man that refused
to speak in order to avoid being made into slaves, while pygmies, for example
because of their flat noses and short statures, were a higher form of ape. In
1699, the English physician Edward Tyson was the first to make a careful
study of the anatomy of a chimpanzee, showing it to be structurally more
similar to humans than to monkeys. He hypothesized that African pygmies
were intermediate to apes and humans (Baker, 1974: 31-32).
Carl Linnaeus supposed that anthropoid apes were structurally not very
distinguishable from humans. By 1758, in the tenth edition of his System
Naturae, he assigned two species to the genus Homo, H. sapiens (man) and H.
troglodytes (anthropoid apes). As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
Linnaeus also classified Homo sapiens into four subspecies: europaeus, afer,
asiaticus, and americanus. He used mental as well as physical qualities to
distinguish them. Thus, europaeus was described as "active, very acute, a discoverer.
.. ruled by custom" and afer (African blacks) were judged as "crafty,
lazy, careless...ruled by caprice."
Later, Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a French naturalist, and Petrus
Camper (1722-1789), a Dutch anatomist, demonstrated that apes were more