THINKING ABOUT RACE — WASHBURN 371 



were distinct for 50 thousand years, although all known skeletons of 

 definite racial affiliation are not over 25,000 years old. Taking a 

 minimum for the length of time that man has been separate from 

 the apes, and a maximum for that during which the races have been 

 distinct, the time during which all living people have shared a com- 

 mon human ancestry is a hundred and forty times that during which 

 any race has been independent. To put the matter conservatively, 

 every living race has had at least 100 times as much of its human 

 ancestry in common with all the other races as it has had alone. Since 

 what divergence has taken place is all after the attainment of essen- 

 tially modern morphology, it is hard to see how any of the living races 

 can be considered significantly more primitive than the others. None 

 of them is close to ancient man, let alone the apes. All are very mod- 

 ern products of the slow process of evolution. 



The genealogical tree which appears in many textbooks is com- 

 pletely misleading. In this tree the races appear to have been sep- 

 arate for a very long period of time, for most of the Pleistocene period. 

 In fact separate races are indicated as old as any definitely dated 

 skeleton of man. Then, too, the time scale is completely misleading. 

 The Pleistocene is indicated as longer than the Pliocene and the Plio- 

 cene than the Miocene. Omitting time or using a changing time scale 

 is very confusing, and is such a frequent feature of genealogical trees 

 that it deserves special mention. Only one of eight trees which I 

 have before me keeps the time scale even approximately correct. The 

 effect of seeing such a tree is that the student gets the impression that 

 the races have been separate for approximately one-third of human 

 history. If this were true, there would undoubtedly be great differ- 

 ences between them. One should never use a chart on which the 

 scale changes or is omitted, because the student inevitably gets the 

 wrong idea. It is impossbile to put both the divergence of the 

 human line from the ape and the differentiation into modern races 

 on any single chart. If the time from the divergence of human and 

 ape stems to the present be represented by an ordinary pack of 52 

 playing cards placed end to end, all racial differentiation would be 

 on less than half of the last card. This is one of the most important 

 facts of human evolution, and the use of genealogical trees with 

 changing time scales, on which the importance of all late events is 

 exaggerated, has obscured it almost completely. 



The practice of comparing individual races directly to the apes 

 should be abandoned. It is usually done with the best intent to show 

 that, although the White is more like the ape in one character, the 

 Negro is in another. But what this practice actually does is to keep 

 alive the idea that it is reasonable and scientifically defensible to 

 compare living men with living apes for the purpose of arranging 



