Occurrences of ‘Blumenbach’ in published writings. After a peak in the early 19th century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach faded into the background. He had little influence on the thinking of later anthropologists. (source) Stephen Jay Gould believed that the Western world view had been perverted by the racial theorizing of anthropologists in the 18th and 19th... Read More

Samuel George Morton, an early American anthropologist. He fudged his data to suit his preconceived ideas on race, according to Stephen Jay Gould. It later turned out that Gould was the fudger. (source) Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) is still seen as a great evolutionary biologist, if not one of the greatest. Yet the years since... Read More

Do empires provide a higher standard of living? In theory, this might seem so. Empires allow goods, capital, and labor to circulate within a much larger land area, thus creating economies of scale and matching supply and demand more efficiently. Empires can also build public works—roads, canals, aqueducts, etc.—that are beyond the reach of smaller... Read More

In history, when was the first encounter between human groups that greatly differed in skin color? The first recorded contacts were probably between the copper-skinned Egyptians and the black-skinned Nubians, known as nehesy, who had pushed down the Nile valley from sub-Saharan Africa to the land of Kush, just south of the second cataract. How... Read More