CLIMATE AND RACE — COON 281 



apelike in many respects than the reader. Schultz has shown (1950) 

 that some of the features which distinguish man from his fellow 

 occupants of the great primate house are more conservative and 

 ancient in man than in the apes. For example, the heavy hair on 

 the human scalp is also present in the newborn chimpanzee, which 

 has hair elsewhere only on its eyelids, eyebrows, and arms. The erect 

 position of the head on the top of the spine, with the position of the 

 face and orbits below the brain case, is another example of what 

 Schultz calls ontogenic retardation, or conservatism, rather than 

 using the less palatable and perhaps less truthful, if commoner, word, 

 fetalization. The human position of the great toe falls also in this 

 class of phenomena, while the smaller size of the other toes is due to 

 shortening rather than to an increase of the length of the big toe itself. 

 Furthermore, we cannot assume that all earlier human types had big 

 teeth and prognathous jaws. The gibbon's face is no larger in pro- 

 portion to its brain and body than that of man. The siamang, 

 in a few examples, has a chin. 



In the basic evolutionary characters all men are equally human as 

 far as we can tell; if some races resemble one or another of the an- 

 thropoids in some particular feature, that may mean only that that 

 particular race is more specialized, more differentiated from the 

 common stock, than the others. No earlier evolutionary status is 

 necessarily implied, at least until we know all the pertinent facts. 



Schultz has shown that among the apes just as much variation 

 is seen as among men, if not more. He says (1950, p. 49) that the 

 "skin color of the chimpanzee varies from black to white . . . the 

 writer has the body of a young chimpanzee, born of black haired 

 parents, which had straw-colored hair at birth, and later this color 

 changed to a reddish tint. . . . Giants and pygmies have developed 

 among chimpanzees and orang-utans, and long-armed and short-armed 

 varieties among gorillas. ... Of the great apes . . . each has a 

 very limited distribution, in contrast to man, yet each has produced 

 several sjjecies or subspecies which are morphologically but not geo- 

 graphically as different from each other as the main races of man." 



Schultz's statement shows that many of the differences between 

 men which we consider racial also occur individually and racially 

 among the apes. This means that the early human forms must have 

 possessed the capacities for these same variations, some of which can, 

 therefore, be very ancient and can go back to the earlier evolutionary 

 stages. In other words, a Negro may have become black before he 

 became a man, a Nordic's ancestor blond and blue-eyed while his 

 brain was still half its present cortical surface size. The evidence 

 used in this paper does not favor any such interpretation, but neither 

 does it render it impossible. 



