Carleton Stevens Coon (June 23, 1904 – June 3, 1981) was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for his scientific racist theories concerning the parallel evolution of human races, which were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific by modern science.
Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, Coon became interested in anthropology after attending Earnest Hooton's lectures at Harvard University. He obtained his PhD in 1928 based on an ethnographic study of the Rif Berbers of Morocco. Returning to Harvard as a lecturer, he conducted further fieldwork in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East. In 1948 he was appointed a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and remained there until his retirement in 1963, also serving as the Curator of Ethnology at the Penn Museum. During World War II, he was an agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he used his anthropological fieldwork as a cover for an arms-smuggling operation in Vichy France-controlled Morocco. He was awarded the Legion of Merit and after the war he retained ties to the military and the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency. He wrote about his wartime experiences in his book, A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent (1980).
Coon's early work in physical anthropology, such as The Races of Europe (1939), was typical of its time. He described the different racial 'types' supposedly present in human populations, but rejected a specific definition of 'race' and made no attempt to explain how these types arose. This changed after 1950, as Coon attempted to defend an essentialist concept of race against the new physical anthropology of contemporaries such as Sherwood Washburn and Ashley Montagu, who argued that the emerging understanding of human genetics negated race as a scientific category. In The Origins of Races (1962), Coon set forth his theory that there were five distinct subspecies of Homo sapiens that evolved in parallel in different parts of the world, and that some had evolved further than others. The book was widely castigated upon its publication and marked a decisive break between Coon and the scientific mainstream. He resigned the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1961, after it voted to condemn a white supremacist book written by Coon's cousin Carleton Putnam. Though Coon continued to defend his theories until his death and rejected the accusations that he was a racist, they were quickly excluded from the scientific consensus as "outmoded ..., typological and racist".
Aside from physical anthropology, Coon conducted a series of archaeological excavations of Stone Age cave sites in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. These included Bisitun Cave, where he discovered traces of the Neanderthals, and Hotu cave, which he claimed showed evidence of early agriculture, though subsequent excavations proved this false. He was also a lifelong proponent of the existence of cryptid 'Wild Men' such as the Sasquatch and Yeti, which he believed were relict populations of human-like apes that, when found, would support his theory of the separate origins of human races. He was involved in planning 'Yeti-hunting' expeditions to Nepal and Tibet, though it has also been speculated that these were cover for espionage.
Coon was married twice, first to Mary Goodale and then to Lisa Dougherty Geddes. He had two sons, including Carleton S. Coon Jr., a diplomat who served as the American Ambassador to Nepal.
Early life and education Carleton Stevens Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts on June 23, 1904. His parents were John Lewis Coon, a cotton factor, and Bessie Carleton. His family had Cornish American roots and two of his ancestors fought in the American Civil War. As a child, he listened to his grandfather's stories of the war and of traveling in the Middle East, and accompanied his father on business trips to Egypt, inspiring an early interest in Egyptology. He initially attended Wakefield High School, but was expelled after breaking a water pipe and flooding the school's basement, after which he went to Phillips Academy. Coon was a precocious student, learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphs at an early age and excelling at Ancient Greek.
Wakefield was an affluent and almost exclusively white town. Coon's biographer, William W. Howells, noted that his "only apparent awareness of ethnicity" was in childhood fights with his Irish American neighbours. Coon himself claimed that "both anti-Semitism and racism were unknown to me before I left home at the age of fifteen, and zero to fifteen are formative years."
Intending to study Egyptology, Coon enrolled at Harvard University and was able to obtain a place on a graduate course with George Andrew Reisner based on his knowledge of hieroglyphic. He also studied Arabic and English composition under Charles Townsend Copeland. However he changed his focus to anthropology after taking a course with Earnest Hooton, inspired by his lectures on the Berbers of the Moroccan Rif. Coon obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1925 and immediately embarked on graduate studies in anthropology. He conducted his dissertation fieldwork in the Rif in 1925, which was politically unsettled after a rebellion of the local populace against the Spanish, and was awarded his PhD in 1928.The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Edition. 2005.
Coon was motivated to study the Rif by the puzzle of the "light-skinned" Riffians' presence in Africa. Throughout much of his fieldwork, he relied on his local informant Mohammed Limnibhy, and even arranged for Limnibhy to live with him in Cambridge from 1928 to 1929.
Academic career After obtaining his PhD, Coon returned to Harvard as a lecturer and later a professor. In 1931 he published his dissertation as the "definitive monograph" of the Rif Berber; studied Albanians from 1920 to 1930; traveled to Ethiopia in 1933; and worked in Arabia, North Africa and the Balkans from 1925 to 1939.
Coon left Harvard to take up a position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. Throughout the 1950s he produced academic papers, as well as many popular books for the general reader, notably including The Story of Man (1954). During his years at Penn in the 1950s, he sometimes appeared on the television program called What in the World?, a game-show produced by the Penn Museum, and hosted by its director, Froelich Rainey, in which a panel of experts tried to identify an object in the museum's collection.
He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his wartime services and the Viking Medal in Physical Anthropology in 1952. He was also named a Membre D'Honneur of the Association de la Libération française du 8 novembre 1942. From 1948 to the early 1960s, he was the Curator of Ethnology at the University Museum of Philadelphia.
Military career
Coon wrote widely for a general audience like his mentor Earnest Hooton. Coon published The Riffians, Flesh of the Wild Ox, Measuring Ethiopia, and A North Africa Story: The Anthropologist as OSS Agent. A North Africa Story was an account of his work in North Africa during World War II, which involved espionage and the smuggling of arms to French resistance groups in German-occupied Morocco under the guise of anthropological fieldwork. During that time, Coon was affiliated with the United States Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Coon served as a mentor to Lloyd Cabot Briggs, another Harvard-educated OSS agent and anthropologist, who embraced anthropometry (measuring features of the human body such as crania and nose sizes) as a means of asserting racial types and categories. Briggs wrote books such as Living Races of the Sahara Desert (1958) and No More for Ever: A Saharan Jewish Town (1962). Historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein notes that Briggs and Coon corresponded during the writing of the latter, for example joking about the genital hair removal customs of Jewish women in Ghardaïa.
After the war, Coon returned to Harvard. He wrote an influential paper in 1945 arguing that the U.S. should continue the use of wartime intelligence agencies to maintain an "Invisible Empire" in the postwar period. He served as a scientific consultant to the CIA from 1948 to 1950 and from 1956 to 1957, worked as a photographer for the Air Force.
Racial theories
Before World War II, Coon's work on race "fit comfortably into the old physical anthropology", describing the racial types supposedly present in human populations based on visible physical characteristics. He explicitly rejected any specific definition of race and used the concept to describe both highly specific groupings of people and continent-spanning racial types. In The Races of Europe (1939), for example, an update of William Z. Ripley's 1899 book of the same title, he distinguished between at least four racial types and sub-types of Jewish people, but also maintained that there existed a single, primordial Jewish race, characterised by a Jewish nose and other physical features that together form "a quality of looking Jewish". In these early works Coon alluded to essential, "pure" racial types that produced the specific races he observed through hybridization, but did not attempt to explain how or where these types arose. He also posited that historically "different strains in one population have showed differential survival values and often one has reemerged at the expense of others (in Europeans)". He suggested that the "maximum survival" of the European racial type was increased by the replacement of the indigenous peoples of the New World and stated that the history of the white race to involved "racial survivals" of white subraces.
The immediate post-war period marked a decisive break in Coon's work on race as the conventional, typological approach was challenged by the "new physical anthropology". Led by Coon's former classmate Sherwood Washburn, this was a movement to shift the field away from description and classification and towards an understanding of human variability grounded in the modern synthesis of biological evolution and population genetics. For some anthropologists, including Ashley Montagu and later Washburn himself, the new physical anthropology necessitated the wholesale rejection of race as a scientific category. In contrast, in Races: A Study in the Problem of Race Formation in Man (1950), Coon, together with his former student Stanley Garn and Joseph Birdsell, attempted to reconcile the race concept with the new physical anthropology's emphasis on genetics and adaptation. He presents some of his theories of racial origins in The Story of Man (1954), in which he states that "Racial discrimination is a holdover from a time when it served a purpose, when a racial division of labor carried with it a certain material and social efficiency." He goes on to label race a nuisance due to its being misunderstood.