HUMAN
EVOLUTION
V o l . 11 - N. 3-4 (261-268) - 1996
R. Caspari M. H. Wolpoff
Weidenreich, Coon, and Multiregional Evolution
Paleoanthropology Laboratory Department of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382 USA
[email protected]
Many theories of human evolution emphasize that there was significant geographic variation. They may have little else in common, though, and the idea that Coon provided the evolutionary basis for Weidenreich's polycentrism, while multiregionalism cleansed Coon's writings of racism has been misleading. Coon and Weidenreich were as different as polygenism and monogenism, and in the basis of their differences lies the genesis of multiregionalism.
Key words:
Introduction Weidenreich, Coon, and the multiregionalists are often linked together, in a sort of linear sequence of intellectual continuity in which it is thought that Coon provided the evolutionary basis for Weidenreich's contentions, and Multiregionalism cleansed Coon's writings of racism (most recently Tattersall, 1995). But quite distinct from Coon's thinking, Multiregional evolution is not a theory of independent race evolution. How did Multiregional evolution get stigmatized as polygeny? We believe it comes from the confusion of Weidenreich's ideas, and ultimately of our own, with Coon's. The historic reason for linking C o o n ' s and W e i d e n r e i c h ' s ideas came from the mischaracterizations of Weidenreich's Polycentric model as a candelabra (Howells, 1942, 1944, 1959, 1993), that made his Polycentric model appear much more similar to Coon's than it actually was. Despite its historic setting, the distortion persists, as the Weidenreich most scientists "know" was created by secondary interpreters and textbook writers. Consider what has been written about Weidenreich in the past few years. Howell recently cited, with approval, W.W. Howells' description of Weidenreich's work as a candelabra, and went on to describe it as requiring "unparalleled parallelism"(Howell, 1994, p. 300). Authors as diverse as Cavalli-Sforza (Cavalli-Sforza et al, 1993) and W o o d (1994) refer to Weidenreich's "Candelabra theory". Lewin (1993, p. 53) discusses Weidenreich in a recent book on The Origin of Modern Humans, describing his theory as the "Candelabra model", and providing a picture of a multicolored Candelabra that illustrates a theory in which the independent evolution of different human races went through the same stages. Tattersall (1995) describes Weidenreich's original trellis as of "mind-boggling complexity", although he believes the diagonal lines were "meaningless in the original, as far as I can tell"(pp. 214215). Tattersall supposes Weidenreich's evolutionary centers were meant to be "parallel lineages", and wonders how they could all evolve the same way. Like several others, he regards Howells' candelabra as a valid and much-needed simplification of Weidenreich's thinking. But is it? We think not; the candelabra cannot validly summarize Weidenreich's views in any possible transformation. However it reflects how Weidenreich and Coon differed, because a Candelabra is actually not far from Coon's precepts. And there is much more to
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Coon's and Weidenreich's differences, that goes far beyond the question of recognizing genic exchanges. How Weidenreich and Coon viewed human evolution was inexorably linked to how they viewed race, and it is here that we best begin.
Weidenreich's
views on race
In The Evolution of Racism, Shipman writes (1994, p. 202): Weidenreich's theory had the interesting effect of placing the origin of races and racial differences far back in time. These were not recent evolutionary developments, his work implied, but deeply-rooted, long-standing distinctions. But his work was too typological in orientation; he had also underestimated the variability within each regional group. Were these actually his views on race? Weidenreich did not leave Germany and begin work on his Polycentric theory until 1934, at the age of 61. For most of his earlier career, Weidenreich's Central European colleagues regarded selection as insufficient to explain evolution, especially major phylogenetic changes (Harwood, 1987). Rejection of selection was virtually universal among German paleontologists, and common among many German geneticists as well (Mayr, 1982). Given this background, the views he developed of intraspecific variation are surprisingly modern in being populational and non-typological. A typologist believes there are racial types because the races were once homogeneous and distinct, each adapted to its own unique environment, and that variation comes from mixing these one-pure entities. These were not Weidenreich's views at all. As far as racial typology was concerned he wrote: any search for stable archetypes ... will be condemned to failure .... Crossing is not a late human acquisition which took place only when man had reached his modern phase, but must have been practiced ever since man began to evolve (Weidenreich, 1946, p. 82). In 1927 he published a short book on Race and Body Form. In it he examined two different ways of organizing human variation. The first, racial variation, was from his point of view a phenomenon of geography. Yet he saw the number of races as arbitrary. It was a matter of definition, the fewer the number of characters used for classifying, the smaller the number of races. Moreover, he recognized that the geographic basis for race differences was not stable, and that the races themselves were not of great antiquity because they were constantly changing. In fact his commitment to race as an organizing principle for human variation was weak. The other organizing principle he considered was constitutional type. In his 1927 publication Weidenreich was the first to show that the constitutional types known for Europeans could be found in all races, albeit in different proportions. He pointed out that unlike races, which are geographic variations, the constitutional types are individual variations. However, like the variation within races, he realized that the number of individuals who correspond to the so-called "ideal" constitutional type is very small, and realized its implications. Therefore, on the issue of race, Weidenreich was a populational thinker, although with a typologist's vocabulary and burdened by an essentialist upbringing and an often imprecise use of English (Dobzhansky (1950) comments on his use of English, although understanding him thoroughly). The populational aspect of Weidenreich's work is evident in his investigation of the distribution of constitutional types, but there was more. One example he liked to use
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was taken from the works of the Swiss anthropologist, Schaafhausen, who examined a very limited sample of 250 draftees from 3 German-speaking Swiss Cantons for evidence of racial "purity". He only used four characters, broadly divided such as small, medium, and tall stature. These gave 108 possible combinations, although only 40 were actually realized in the limited sample. Surprisingly, Schaafhausen found that the combination that racial thinkers considered typical for the Nordic race, the race believed to be most common among the Germans - tall, long headed, light eyes, blonde hair - was not found in a single individual. The combinations for 3 other races that might be found among the Germans were found, in total, in 9.6% of the sample. The other 90.4% were not "racially pure". Most of these Germans from a very limited area could be considered hybrids, although as Weidenreich points out: The interpretation of individuals presenting combinations other than the conventional ones as "hybrids" is based on the presumption that the features considered as characteristic of a race of today were even more pronounced in the past ... in other words that the races were once purer than they are today and that their character has changed by interbreeding (1946, p. 81). But Weidenreich did not believe the races were ever pure. His contentions about the non-existence of racial purity were apparent in his earlier study of the Upper Cave remains from Zhoukoudian. Weidenreich (1939) was the only paleoanthropologist who was able to study the original specimens. Although often cited as questioning the Mongoloid affinities of UC 101, what he actually questioned was their C h i n e s e affinities,"in so far as it is permissible to use this designation in determining a race". He contended that the three Shandingdong crania "show certain common features" of an Asian sort, but typify "three different racial elements, best to be classified as primitive Mongoloid, Melanesoid and Eskimoid". In particular, he wrote "... recent North Chinese may be considered as more advanced types, but traceable to ancestors like those represented by the Upper Cave man". Weidenreich thereby addressed the general question of racial origins, whether there once were pure races that subsequently mixed to form today's hybridized populations. He took the Shandingdong specimens as proof that there never were, reasoning that if races had been "pure" in the past, and mixed with each other more and more over time, until achieving their present state in which no pure races are left, we would expect that variation of a past sample should be less than today's as there was less intermixture in the past. But Shandingdong showed, if anything, m o r e variation and therefore strongly implied that there never were pure races. Instead, from the fact that the same constitutional types were found in every race, Weidenreich concluded: the development and stability of ... constitutional types and their occurrence in all racial groups of mankind today ... give evidence that geographical isolation is not and cannot have been a prerequisite for the establishment of [differentiations] in man (1946, p. 86). He recognized interbreeding as all-pervasive: the tendency of man to interbreed without any regard to existing racial differences ... is so today; it has been so in historic times, and there is no reason to believe that man was more exclusive in this respect in still earlier times (1946, p. 85) Because of the extent of mixture, no diagnostic features ever became fixed and races, whether past or present, could not be distinguished by the presence or absence of a single key feature or features. "Whether a certain feature should be considered as a racial character does not depend on the occurrence as such, but on its frequency" (1943, p. 254).
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For Weidenreich (1946. p. 67), citing Roland Dixon"race is not a permanent entity, something static ... it is dynamic and is slowly developing and changing."
Race in Coon's Thinking For Coon, geographic variation was strong enough to be described as subspecies. It was long lasting enough to independently cross the boundaries of what he considered different species, so that the subspecies of Homo erectus became the subspecies of Homo sapiens. He believed that these subspecies represented different types, delineated by their differing adaptations and distinct boundaries: Over the border, which may be a natural barrier such as a range of mountains or a patch of desert, or even a critical isotherm, may be found another subspecies of the same species, equally well established in a state of equilibrium with its environment. As the two environments differ in certain details, so do the two genetic structures of its occupants .... In each territory natural selection keeps the gene structure of the local subspecies constant by also eliminating unfavorable genes that flow over the border (Coon, 1962, p. 16). At the geographic nucleus of subspecies one finds relatively pure types, which have not been diluted by admixture. He wrote further, in The Origin of Races: each of the five subspecies recognized in this book was firmly and uniquely installed in its geographic center. Between the nuclei of these five centers lie intermediate regions (1962, p. 18). Minor variation came from these types mixing in these intermediate regions. Variation for Coon was a hurdle to overcome or ignore, not examine for its own meaning, and he spent much of his career trying to establish "true" divisions of humankind and further refining and defining racial categories metrically and morphologically. Simply put, Coon was a typologist. His races were real, distinct, long lasting entities and he was fundamentally interested in their origin.
The Problem In the fossil record, both Weidenreich and Coon saw that there was evolutionary continuity in different regions. But they also knew the same evolutionary events happened everywhere, across the whole human range. Herein lay the contradiction for them. Common evolution
meant genetic connections, long lasting geographic differences meant genetic isolation. How could the races change the same way given the isolation necessary for regional features? They each grappled with part of this contradiction, but because of their totally different precepts of race each was concerned about a different part. Neither was fully successful.
Coon's Solution Coon was stymied by this problem. His emphasis on the importance of regional difference forced him to focus on explaining the first point - how the same evolutionary events happened everywhere. He already explained regional differences, because of the essentially different aspects of the hominid subspecies.
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His idea that the races evolved at different rates, crossing a sapiens threshold at different times, was quite like Haeckel's (c.f. Wolpoff, 1994), who thought the races were different species, but recognized there were no distinct boundaries between them and that they could interbreed. Haeckel believed that each race had traveled a different distance from their apelike ancestral condition, stopping at different points along their evolutionary trajectory, and this is not much different from Coon's contention that the races to cross the sapiens threshold first evolved the furthest. Coon, like Haeckel, does admit to genic exchange between the subspecies. His defenders point to this fact as they contend he was not a true polygenist because his scheme was not one of independent evolution. But the fact that he believed the races evolved at different rates and became human at different times surely shows that independent evolution was the overwhelming signal he read from the fossil record. Coon's use of genic exchanges to explain worldwide trends was always half-hearted and seemingly an afterthought. Genic exchanges were never so important that they were able to prevent the hominid subspecies from evolving at different rates and crossing the "sapiens threshold" at quite different times - the essentially polygenist aspect of his thinking was that the different subspecies attained their humanity separately. He never could convincingly solve the problems presented by what appeared to be massive parallelisms in his polygenic scheme.
Race and Weidenreich's Polycentric Scheme Weidenreich was anything but a polygenist (Dobzhansky, 1950). He thought all Pleistocene humans were Homo sapiens, which is as monogenic as one could be, and his Polycentric theory was dictated by his view of intraspecific variation. His view of race as transitory, even arbitrary, forced him to face the other part of the contradiction: what could account for the evolutionary continuity in different regions? If there were never once pure races, if populations were constantly hybridizing, why could modern racial features be found in past populations? Weidenreich differed from Coon in realizing it was certain regional features, and not today's races, that extended into the past. He knew that "the existence of racial types in the past identifiable with those of today would demonstrate that their differentiation and fixation must have taken place long before Upper Paleolithic times". This is a possibility that Weidenreich was not prepared to believe, as can be seen in his treatment of the Shandingdong remains described above (and see Wolpoff, 1995). Weidenreich links his view of race to his Polycentric theory (trellis) in asking "whether and to what extent the races of today are traceable to the races of earlier phases of man's development?" The answer he gives is that today's races cannot be traced as races to past populations. Racial evolution is like a multichanneled stream, constantly dividing and merging. "Typical features of Australian aborigines occurred in Pithecanthropus and Homo soloensis" (1946, p. 84), or "some of the characteristic features of Sinanthropus reappear in certain Mongoloid groups of today" (1947a, p. 201). But "this statement does not mean that modern Mongols derived exclusively from Sinanthropus nor that Sinanthropus did not give rise to other races" (1943, p. 254). The past races are not the same as the present ones, for two reasons: 1.While there is significant local, or regional ancestry, it is not unique ancestry and a past race has descendants in all living races, just as a living race has ancestors in all past ones. 2.Weidenreich regarded races as transitory and not permanent because of their hybridity, as
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evidenced by the fact that the same constitutional types were found in all races. Since fossil discoveries such as Shandingdong confirmed his view that there never were pure races in the past, it followed that regional continuity could not be the continuity of populations or races, but the continuity of features. Weidenreich understood why evolutionary changes in humans were universal, and why they followed certain pathways (Weidenreich, 1947b), but he never could convincingly explain the diversity, the regional continuities he so perceptively described.
Continuities and change Regional continuities provide key anatomical evidence for the Multiregional model (Wolpoff, Wu, and Thorne, 1984; Thorne and Wolpoff, 1992). But they are not the major signal sent by the fossil record, and are not the most telling aspect of Multiregional evolution. Human evolution has not been mostly about local continuities, but about species-wide changes. Like Weidenreich, multiregionalists hold that mixing has been a constant aspect of human populations. Therefore, while some elements of geographic variation are long-lasting, races are transitory and constantly dividing and merging. It is the continuities in adaptive characteristics, expected products of the evolutionary process, that are almost certainly the most common form of regional continuity. They are usually expressed as exaptations, which by their very nature are dependent on history as well as the adaptive process. The adaptations influenced by already existing morphology have the potential for equivalence - the same requirements met in different ways. For instance, marginal ridges and crown curvature are manifestations of upper incisor shoveling that provide equivalent means of expanding incisor size in a limited alveolar space (Crummett, 1995). We might think of an adaptive landscape in the Pleistocene with several different adaptive valleys. An Asian population gets stuck in one valley, straight crowns and large marginal ridges, while a European population gets stuck in another, curved crowns and only moderate marginal ridges. They can stay this way for a long time because selection keeps pushing them down in, even in the face of genic exchanges, assuming it is important in both populations to have large incisors in small spaces. However, the predominant evolutionary pattern was created by advantageous changes that spread widely through the matrix of interconnected populations, linked by both genic exchanges and the common background of the evolving cultural system whose elements also could spread. For instance, as modern humans evolved, most modernizing features arose at different times and places and dispersed independently throughout the network of interconnected human populations. This web of population relations comes from the widespread admixture created by population movements and exogamy. The relationships of populations, languages, and cultures are multiple and complex, and there are even more pathways for genic exchanges. Populations, languages, and cultures each descend from, and are rooted in multiple antecedents, dividing and merging in a matrix of changing patterns which Moore (1994) describes as ethnogenesis. The ethnogenic pattern of descent and relationships is likened to the channels in a river that can separate and recombine numerous times. Each population (or language, or culture) may have several ancestors and several descendants. The continued population interactions and exchanges they imply mean there is no clear link between language, culture, and biology (Wolf, 1994). This is a hallmark of modern humanity that could be productively applied to
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past p o p u l a t i o n s that s h o w the a b s e n c e o f any c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n culture and biology. It is certainly a pattern of evolutionary c h a n g e that c a n n o t p o s s i b l y be topologically t r a n s f o r m e d into a b r a n c h i n g pattern, and therefore no b r a n c h i n g analysis, or analysis that a s s u m e s b r a n c h i n g e v o l u t i o n , can validly address H o m o s a p i e n s e v o l u t i o n (Moore, 1995). P e r h a p s more than a n y t h i n g else, it is the i n c o m p a t i b i l i t y o f b r a n c h i n g m o d e l s such as the c a n d e l a b r a with Multiregional evolution that s h o w s C o o n c o u l d n e v e r h a v e b e e n its intellectual progenitor.
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Received December 5, 1995
Accepted AprU 25, 1996
