Negroid

The three greatest races according to the German encyclopedia Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 1885-1890. The subtypes of the black race are shown in brown tones.

The terms negroid race and black race were used for the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa in the context of a now obsolete model of dividing humanity into different races, today considered racism. These populations share certain phenotypic traits such as dark pigmentation.^{[citation needed]}

Formerly, Australian aborigines, Melanesians and Negritos were included in the Negroid race in popular anthropology and cartography. However, as early as 1870, Thomas Huxley suggested that Aboriginal Australians, Negroes and Melanesians, as well as Papuans (the inhabitants of New Guinea), should be referred to as a separate race known as Australoids. This had become a general practice in the 1940s.

Carleton Stevens Coon rejected the notion of a unified Negroid race in his 1962 book The Origin of Races, in which he divided the black African population into a "congoid" 3. 4; and another "capoid".

Today there is a broad scientific consensus that there are no human races in a biological sense and that the concept of distinct races is rooted in sociopolitical and historical processes rather than empirical observation.

Races do not exist, biologically or scientifically. Men by their common origin belong to the same genetic repertoire. The variations we can see are not the result of different genes. If "races" were to be treated, there is only one "race": the human.

José Marín Gonzáles

History of the concept

In the physical anthropology of the 19th century and the first half of the XX, the Negroid race was one of three, four, or five general racial classifications of human beings — Caucasoid, Mongoloid , Negroid and sometimes Capoid, Australoid, Amerindian. Under this classification scheme, which has its roots in the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), humans are divisible into broad subgroups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology.

Description

Types of Africans according to a book of 1914.

The "Negroids" They have generally been described as having a very dark complexion, an elongated head, a slightly domed forehead, a flatter and broader nose, dark eyes, fuller lips, dark curly hair, long legs, and a tall stature.

Ashley Montagu cataloged "the Neotenic structural features in which... Negroids differ from Caucasoids... flattened nose, flattened root of the nose, narrower ears, longer joints narrow, skull with frontal eminences, delayed closure of premaxillary sutures, less hairiness, longer eyelashes, [and] cruciform pattern of second and third molars"

Coon and Cavalli-Sforza

Later extensions of the terminology, such as in Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races, place this theory in an evolutionary context. Coon divides the species Homo sapiens into five groups, caucasoid, capoid, congoid, australoid i> and Mongoloid, based on the assumed timing of their evolution from homo erectus. He positioned the capoid race as a separate racial entity and he labeled the two main divisions of what he called the congoid race as the "African Negroes" and the "pygmies", divided indigenous Africans into these two distinct groups based on their date of origin and a loose classification of mere appearance — however, this led to disagreement between approaches dating back to divergence and the consequent contradictory results.

Cavalli-Sforza does not accept this double divide, pointing out that pygmies have a very different genetic signature from other black Africans, who must have originally had their own now-unknown language, but have since adopted the language of peoples Bantu around them. Cavaill-Sforza does not accept, as Coon did, that each race evolved separately; he accepts the currently dominant paradigm, the From Africa Theory, that is, that all humans are descendants of small groups of people who migrated from Africa beginning about 60,000 years ago.