Negroid

Negroid (also known as Congoid) is a historical grouping of human beings, once purported to be an identifiable race and applied as a political class by another dominant 'non-negroid' culture. The term had been used by forensic and physical anthropologists to refer to individuals and populations that share certain morphological and skeletal traits that are frequent among populations in most of Sub-Saharan Africa and isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). Within Africa, a racial dividing line separating Caucasoid physical types from Negroid physical types was held to have existed, with Negroid groups forming most of the population south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast. First introduced in the early racial science and anthropometry of the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, Negroid denoted one of the three purported major races of humankind (alongside Caucasoid and Mongoloid). Many social scientists have argued that such analyses are rooted in sociopolitical and historical processes rather than in empirical observation. However, Negroid as a biological classification remains in use in forensic anthropology. The term today is usually considered racist, along with the term it derived from, Negro. Negroid has both Latin and Ancient Greek etymological roots. It literally translates as 'black resemblance' from negro (black), and οειδές -oeidēs, equivalent to -o- + είδες -eidēs 'having the appearance of', derivative of είδος eîdos 'appearance'. The earliest recorded use of the term 'Negroid' came in 1859. In modern usage, it is associated with populations that on the whole possess the suite of typical Negro physical characteristics. In the 19th century, Samuel George Morton posited a 'Negro Family', which he grouped with the Caffrian, Hottentot, Oceanic-Negro, Australian, and Alforian families. 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. Later iterations 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 each taxon's evolution from Homo erectus 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 distinct Congoid and Capoid groups based on their date of ancestral origin rather than just phenotype. Afrocentrist author Cheikh Anta Diop contrasted 'Negroid' with 'Cro-Magnoid' in his publications arguing for 'Negroid' primacy. Grimaldi Man, Upper Paleolithic fossils found in Italy in 1901, had been classified as Negroid by Boule and Vallois (1921). The identification was obsolete by the 1960s, but was controversially revived by Diop (1989). In the context of the first peopling of the Sahara, there was a debate in the 1970s whether the non-negroid, mixed, or negroid fossils found in the region were older. Asselar man, a 6,400 year old fossil discovered in 1927 in the Adrar des Ifoghas near Essouk (now the Kidal Region of Mali), was claimed as the oldest known anatomically modern human skeleton of Negroid type. In the first half of the 20th century, the traditional subraces of the Negroid race were regarded as being the True Negro, the Forest Negro, the Bantu Negro, the Nilote, the Negrillo (also known as the African Pygmy), the Khoisan (often historically referred to as Hottentot and Bushman), the Negrito (also known as the Asiatic Pygmy), and the Oceanic Negroids (consisting of the Papuan and Melanesian).