Racism is intimately connected with imperialism and serves as one of its ideological underpinnings. The growth of racism in the West has been historically co-terminus with the growth of colonialism. Colonising Africa, Asia and the “New World” was accompanied by slavery, genocide and plunder. The justification for this was simple -- the white races were superior and destined to rule -- the other races had to give way before the master race. While such theories were initially sought to be justified using religion, the induction of science in the debate took place in the 19th century and gave these arguments a qualitatively new spin.

Science is quite often asked to play the role of religion in today’s societies. The earlier claims for the superior order were backed by religion -- the sons of Ham being cursed by god and therefore blackened, the kings ruled by divine right, the upper castes are twice born and therefore superior, etc. Modern societies however, require different kinds of legitimisation. Thus the view that the vast underclass spawned by the post industrial order is condemned to a subordinate position by virtue of inferior intelligence. Adding to this, is the racial component of the theory -- blacks are naturally inferior while the Caucasian races are superior. The “science” of psychometrics  or Intelligence Quotient (IQ) measurement is pulled out to justify this unequal social order. It is this variant racism which is dominant today. The arguments about racial differences in intelligence -- the Bell Curve Debate -- evolutionary theories that propose that some races have originated earlier than others from the our common ancestors, are all a part of this rubric. With Darwin’s theory of evolution, social Darwinism -- the survival of the fittest means that the rich go the top of the heap as they are intrinsically superior -- is added as an ideological justification of a class society. Coupled with this is social Darwinism as applied to the racial divide -- blacks and browns are economically inferior as they are less intelligent -- a hierarchy of races that reflect the current unequal international order.

 Lest we feel superior to the West on these counts, we must realise that these ideological underpinnings are very much a part of the structure of justification of social inequalities in India too. Caste structure, a part of the class structure of the past, is today supported not by appeal to religion alone but also to inherent superiority of the upper castes. And when it comes to Africans, Indian racism mimics its western counterparts (except that India’s encounter with Africa has been far less intense). That is why the theories of Aryan superiority and the “final solution” proposed by Hitler struck such a sympathetic chord in the founders of the RSS. The Golwalkars and Savarkars were deeply enamoured of Hitler and saw themselves as true Aryans. They were after all the Chitpavan Brahmins. It is not an accident that the Nagpur hierarchy of the RSS has been dominated by the upper castes, particularly the Chitpavan Brahmins. The myth of Aryan superiority is not only living in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis in the West, but also closer at home. 

Racial differences, particularly with regards to intelligence, are central to much of this “scientific” racism. Thus, a number of studies have been conducted to show that races have differences in intelligence as measured by IQ. IQ is the bed rock on which most of these claims rest. The tragedy of IQ is that it has been used for expressly opposite purpose to what it was originally constructed. A French educator, Alfred Binet developed this concept in late 19th century and used certain tests to identify educationally backward children. He expressly warned that it should not be used to quantify intelligence but was a merely a device to identify the educationally handicapped. In a few decades, it was used to justify the eugenic Nazi program, sterilisation of the “feeble minded," new immigration laws in US ----- keeping out the Jewish, Irish and Slavic people -- and excluding the majority of children in UK from higher education. So rarely has a so called scientific principle used to wreak so much social havoc.

It is not realised that the eugenic program so popular with the Nazis had wide support from the intelligentsia in Europe and America. The use of mental testing in US Army had “scientifically proved” that the Jews, Slavs and Mediterranean stock were inferior to the Nordic. Henry Goddard, one of the fathers of IQ testing “showed” that 80% of the Jews, Italians and Hungarians and 90% of the Russians were “feeble minded." The differences in IQs between these races and the Nordic were of the same order as between blacks and whites today, the basis of the current racial theorists of IQ like Eysenk, Jenson, Murray and Herrnstein. The papers, the discussions and views of that period give a complete sense of déjà vu when we read the views of similar “scientists” and “social scientists” today. Eugenics became illegitimate because of the revulsion to Nazism and not because the people who espoused eugenics saw the scientific error of their ways.

In the view of heriditarians --those who believe that intelligence is largely hereditary -- intelligence is a measurable quantity and is passed on genetically. Obviously, heriditarians support the existing unequal social order. The unjust order, according to them, is the “natural” result of intelligence being genetically unevenly distributed in the population. The eugenic program logically follows -- the less endowed should be allowed to die out to improve the genetic stock. Intervention by the state therefore, according to the hereditarians, against “nature”. If racial differences of intelligence can be found, then the eugenic program would also argue for racial cleansing. This was the basis of the Nazi death camps and therefore not so distant from the current theoretical discussions on IQ, race and intelligence.

The environmentalist argument is that intelligence, even if it can be measured, is a product of the environment, both physical and social. Thus, poverty produces poor IQs rather than the other way around. Not surprisingly, the environmentalist program is socially progressive and in favour of state intervention.
The importance of IQ therefore comes not from its intrinsic value, but from the social construction put on it. If  IQ is a measure of intelligence and genetically linked, then much of the argument for a conservative agenda can be legitimised. But is intelligence measured by the IQ scores? And what does heritability of intelligence mean? Finally, if IQ is genetically marked, can it also be race specific?

Intelligence is one of the most subtle of human characteristics. We routinely make judgements of peoples’ intelligence from a variety of responses that people have to differing situations and have convinced ourselves that intelligence is a physical number expressing in some sense the computing power of the brain. Current research from a host of disciplines -- from artificial intelligence to psychology -- has shown that the ability called intelligence depends on the amount of information the people have been exposed to and their practice on solving the problems they are confronted with. Research has also shown that intelligence is not one number:  we have many kinds of intelligence rather than just one. Human beings are complex, they have verbal, mathematical and many other forms of intelligence than just one number summing up all their intellectual capacities. Thus reduction of intelligence to just one number has more to do with its social use then a measure of intelligence.

The second part of intelligence is how genetically linked is it? Though hereditarians have propounded that intelligence is linked genetically to the tune of 60-80%, the data is open to multiple interpretations. Simply put, if poor people have a poor environment, then their children would show poorer IQs. The nature versus nurture debate focused on identical twin studies -- twins who had been separated at birth. It is argued that if twins who are genetically identical but exposed to different environments show similar IQs, then this would prove that IQ is determined largely genetically.

Much of the identical twin studies were found to have been fabricated by Cyril Burt, who was the architect for keeping the poor out of higher education in England. After Burt’s fall from grace, it took some time for the IQ theorists to bounce back. However, recently an interesting study in the University of Pittsburgh has called into question the fundamental premise of the identical twin studies. It is now known that pre-natal environment is a crucial factor in development of intelligence. Children of mothers who suffer from malnutrition tend to have children who have lower IQs. If that is so, then the identical twins though separated at birth still share a common environment -- the mother’s womb. Once the results of the identical studies are corrected for this, the 60-80% difference touted by the hereditarians in identical twin studies reduces at best to about 50%.  However, it is interesting to know that even if intelligence is hereditary to the tune of 50%, it is one of the weakest hereditary correlation’s, as properties like height, skin colour, etc., are correlated to the tune of 90% and above.

The last part of the neo-conservative argument is the weakest. It is true that racial differences exist currently in IQ scores. To make the racist construction of the black and white divide more palatable, the Mongolian races currently are being given higher IQ based on flimsy evidence. The crucial argument is of course black IQ scores.

The Afro-Americans and Africans have scores similar to that of the Jews and Russians 50 years back. Nobody now proposes that these differences were due to differences in intelligence. It is now agreed that IQ measurements depend on the questions asked in these tests and these tests are not culturally neutral. If those being tested do not share the same cultural background of the ones setting up the test questions, a lower score will reflect this cultural difference. Thus instead of looking towards these elements for an explanation of the difference in IQ test scores, the attempt is to derive racial stereotypes.

The other refutation of racial links to IQ has come from genetics. Current genetic research (The Human Genome Project) has shown that genetic differences between races are less than 1% while differences within each individual race are very much larger. Even if intelligence is genetically linked, IQ scores cannot be used to show its relationship with any race. For example, height is known to be genetically linked, thus taller parents in the US and India will tend to have taller children. However, the average height difference between the US and Indians is still likely to be nutritional and not genetic, even though height is a genetically linked characteristic.

Attempts to find scientific validity for social prejudice are nothing new. In the 19th century, leading anatomists and anthropologists such as Brocca, and Cuvier, measured brain sizes and shapes and called it phrenology. The “science” of phrenology was used to argue for gender and race differences in intelligence and for “criminal types”. They also implicitly believed in the superiority of the white races and produced data to conform to such beliefs. Stephen Jay Gould, the noted palaeontologist, went through Brocca’s and Cuvier’s data and found that they neglected obvious elementary factors in these calculations. Thus body size, expected to be highly correlated to brain size, was not taken into account. Even more interesting were the subjective factors involved. Thus Brocca and Cuvier systematically made errors of measurement, always in favour of their beliefs. Gould observes that it is difficult to believe that they consciously fudged data. However, they were so convinced of the truth of racial superiority that subconsciously, they erred in favour of their convictions. Of course, phrenology became discredited with increased understanding of the brain and realisation that the various bumps on the head had very little to do with either intelligence or criminality.

Brain sizes are no longer used to justify social discrimination. Instead, we have IQ measurements. One perceptive observer described the racial use of IQ as another way of calling some people “niggers and wogs.” Indian intelligentsia also finds the IQ construct comfortable as it fits into the meritocratic framework of the caste system. Affirmative action in either US or in India in terms of reservations cannot be popular with the privileged. Thus a class, caste or racial elite will seek to legitimise its privileged position on its supposedly higher innate intelligence. It is the social order that determines the “science” of IQ. Earlier, to justify social and racial differences, they measured skulls and called this “science” phrenology. Now we have IQ and psychometrics to back up social prejudice and privilege. Calling people niggers, wogs and Sudras is still the game -- only the veneer is scientific.

In Alexandria, Egypt, there is a Greco-Romanic museum founded by two Frenchman in 1890’s. The striking feature of this museum is its attempt to portray Egypt under the Ptolemy’s as essentially Greek. Alexander founded Alexandria during his conquest and Ptolemy, as one of his generals, was initially its overlord and later its king, much in the same way as Selukas Nikator was the Greek overlord near India. Not only is the essentially Egyptian civilisation under Ptolemy’s portrayed as Greek, the African elements in Egyptian civilisation, so clearly displayed in the pyramids and the Valley of Kings, is consciously downplayed. So much so that the uncomfortable African presence in Alexandria is dismissed by claiming “.. the Negro element with their characteristic thick lips, woolly hair and wide sunken eyes were at the lower rungs of Alexandrian society..”. This racist description of Africans and their consignment to the lowest part of Alexandrian society is a part of a much larger story of racism and its relation to ancient civilisations of Greece, Egypt and Phoenicia.

Central to colonialism and imperialism, has been the myth of white European superiority. Unless the Africans and Asians could be considered as lesser human beings, it was difficult to justify their treatment under colonialism. The Africans suffered even worse, their requirement as slave labour for the “New World” meant that they had to be dehumanised virtually to the level of animals. Otherwise, how can wholesale slaughter and slavery of the African people be justified? The sheer numbers involved are important -- it is estimated that over a period of 360 years, 80 million were taken as slaves, of which only 20 million survived the capture and the brutal sea voyage to America. This may be compared to the total population of Africa, which remained stagnant at about 100 million during this period. Such savagery by the so-called civilised Europeans needed a racial justification. Thus Cuvier, the great anthropologist, likened the Africans to the “.. monkey tribes: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism”. Comte Gobineau, the historian and the father of modern racism, considered, “ The black variety (of humans) is the lowest and lies at the bottom of the ladder”. Though, the Asians as browns fared better, being placed in between the black and whites, the idea that the white civilisation with its “manifest superiority” could be beholden to either brown or black was strenuously denied.

European racism had one central problem. Before the European Renaissance, there was little evidence of European superiority. The only ancient civilisation was that of Greece. Therefore, in science, mathematics, philosophy and arts, Europe had to trace its roots to Greece. While this did not prove a problem -- the purging of all Arab and Asian influence in the intervening years could be easily done by regarding all such influence as marginal -- Greece itself proved a much thornier problem. The ancient Greeks themselves viewed their science and culture to be derived from Egypt. They also regarded their alphabet to be a gift of the Phoenicians and their religion, philosophy and science deeply influenced by the Egyptian priests. Pythagoras learnt his mathematics in Egypt as did Plato his philosophy. Zeno, the famous logician was a Phoenician. While in ancient times, this proved no problem, the butchery of black Africa and the Anti Semitism of the 19th-20th century (culminating in the massacre of the Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers), made the debt to black Africa and the Semitic Phoenicians difficult to accept.

While much of the overt anti racism of the 19th and 20th century is no longer respectable, it is important to realise that the construction of the modern view of ancient history has taken place in this period. Martin Bernal, in his seminal work  “Black Athena -- The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation” has shown how deeply racist was the formation of this modern view of ancient history. He has shown that the fall of the Greek view of Egypt and Phoenicia, which he calls the Ancient Model, was not due to any new discoveries in either linguistics, or archaeology, but entirely to the new “science” of race which now was regarded as the major explanatory factor in history. In this view, the White races -- the Aryans -- could not be indebted to lesser races, and the Greek view of their own civilisation had to be destroyed while at the same time asserting Greek supremacy. This, as, Bernal calls it, was the Aryan Model of history. While this view of race may have become illegitimate in the aftermath of Hitler, the dominant paradigm created in the heyday of racism still remains virtually intact. It is also important to note that the Ancient Model was the prevalent view for a very long period -- from the writings of Greek historians such as Herodotus to the 16th Century, and was replaced only gradually by the Aryan Model. Only in the 20th Century, in the 20’s and 30’s, the extreme form of this model became the dominant view. While racial underpinnings of history are now difficult to articulate, nevertheless, the inertia of academia, coupled with neo-colonialism, means that this view can still continue for quite some time. Bernal has argued, with a wealth of historical, archaeological and linguistic data, for a return to a revised Ancient Model. In a penetrating analysis of prevailing historiography, he states:

“If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the revised Ancient one, it will be necessary to rethink the fundamental basis of ‘Western Civilisation’ but also recognise the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, the philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th-19th century Romantics and racists, it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was not seen as merely as the epitome of Europe but also its pre childhood, to have been the result of mixture of native Europeans and colonising Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable”.

The position of Greece is central to the racial myth of European superiority. Ancient Greece is presumed to be the origin of this Western civilisation. Thus all art, philosophy, and science before the European developments in the 16th and 17th century had to be constructed as only Greek; all other civilisations Egyptian, Chinese, Indian and Arabic had to be dismissed as peripheral to modern thought. Thus ancient Greece had to be preserved from any influence of civilisations that preceded it and were in close proximity -- primarily Egyptian and Phoenician. Against Egypt, the racial paradigm had to go a step further, it had also to be “whitened” and its African lineage disputed. It did not matter that the ancient Egyptian paintings and sculpture, particularly of the earlier dynasties, clearly identified them as earth coloured. To explain the inexplicable, a new term “brunet white” was even coined.

It is interesting that while racial prejudice was manifest in constructing the “white Egyptian”, a simple test to check for skin colour was not performed during all this debate. Egypt, unlike any other civilisation, preserved their dead -- mummies are available for checking the amount of melanin contained in the skin. Strangely enough, such a test was not done till the noted Senegalese nuclear physicist, Cheikh Anta Diop entered the debate. Dr. Diop did this test in 1961 and found that the amount of melanin in the ancient Egyptians made them clearly of African origin. It is symptomatic of academic myopia that even today, there are serious Egyptologists who argue that the colour of Egyptians are not relevant -- this despite the continuous extolling of all that is Greek in the Western literature. The second test, again not done for Greece civilisation was to test Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek through comparative linguistics. As Bernal has shown, such a study would have immediately shown the extent of Greek borrowings from their immediate and more civilised neighbours.

The Greeks never really hid their debt -- they always acknowledged that their religion, science and philosophy had foreign origins.  The astounding historical inversion by which all such influence was exorcised was not any historical evidence, but the new “science” of race. It was based entirely on Aryan nature and Negro/Semitic racial characteristics. Obviously in a climate that gave rise to Nazi Germany and the final “solution”, this was clinching evidence. It should not be forgotten that virulent racism was not only dominant in Germany, but was quite fashionable in America, England and France. Its practitioners, Maspero in France, Robert Knox in England and Niebuhr in Germany, were all united in their belief of the manifest superiority of European civilisation and were quite willing to ask for the extermination or destruction of all others. Thus Robert Knox, the English anatomist, who employed gravediggers and exhorted them to get him fresh corpses, wrote “Race is every thing: literature, science, art -- in a world civilisation depended on it”. He went further to exhort genocide “.. what a field of extermination lies before the Saxon/Celtic and the Sarmatan (Slav) races”. It is Hitler and the Second World War that de-legitimised racial theories even though their practitioners have not changed.

While Hitler’s genocide of the Jews have made the Semitic debt more difficult to denounce, the African influence on Greece through Egypt still has no takers. Martin Bernal feels that this is due to the fact that Ancient Egypt has no champion, even modern Egypt identifies not with Ancient Egypt but with the Arabs. I think there are deeper reasons to this resistance. First, in the world of race, Semitic races have become again white. The state of Israel is identified with the West and therefore accepting a Semitic debt is now easier. Accepting an Egyptian and consequently a black debt is even more difficult as it goes against the grain of the prevailing view in the West of Africa as a dark continent, quite appropriate for neo-colonial plunder.  The second is that science and rationalism is central to Europe’s claim to superiority. If these are seen as derivative of Egyptian science and philosophy, the basis of regarding Western civilisation as scientific and rational while others are not, will collapse. 

A number of Egyptologists and Greek scholars have indignantly rejected that their views have been informed by racism and they are a part of a conspiracy to deny Africans their true heritage. The issue here is not the personal motives of the scholars but the power of ideology. Ideology of race is so deep rooted that the basis of statements taken to be axiomatically true are not examined. Thus that Greece is the fount of all advances in science and mathematics is taken for granted and no attempt is made to examine this critically. This view of science has necessitated a restricted view of science and a partial view of history. Martin Bernal has exposed that academic disciplines have much deeper ideological biases. The fabrication of Ancient Greece, as Bernal calls it, is one such project. Another is the fabrication of the history of modern science in which only Greece and the West have played any part. The tragedy is that a number of radicals have accepted this myth and therefore rejected science and reason per se. The success of imperialist ideology is thus doubly assured -- you either accept their myth or reject their science -- in either case they are the clear victors. A rejection of imperialist ideology must therefore invert the basis of such claims -- how western is western. Martin Bernal has done an enormous service by exposing the racial underpinning of the “sacred” Greek history. However, rescuing science and reason from the West and restoring its universality still remains as a future task.

The evolution of humanity from the more ape like ancestors may appear to be only a scientific question. However, race and class viewpoints are intimately connected to such questions as they impact the structure of power in today’s world. For 50 years, the dominant scientific view denied an African origin of humanity -- the scientists could not accept that humanity had evolved in what they saw as the “dark Continent”. It also denied that human intelligence evolved as a product of labour -- that tool making came before the human brain evolved. Whole ideological bias may not be surprising in science, the surprising part was that even a deliberate fraud was committed to propagate such theories. In 1911, a fake fossil was created by using a recent human skull and a gorilla jaw and “discovered” in Sussex, England -- the so-called Piltdown Man. This was then used for arguing that each of the human races evolved from the apes separately (the theory of polygeny) and intelligence appeared before tool making.

 While a fraud of this nature is unusual in science, it is the tenacity with which all contrary evidence was denied that points to the deep class and racial biases of the scientists. For nearly 50 years and in spite of mounting evidence of an African origin, no examination was made of the Piltdown fossil. Finally, during routine radio carbon dating of all exhibits in the British Museum, the Piltdown fossil was found to be a fraud, albeit an expert one. Obviously, the people that had perpetrated the fraud knew their trade well to have generated this “authentic” fossil. While the motives of those involved in the fraud can only be a matter of speculation, perhaps they were so convinced of the “correctness” of early origins for the white races that they decided to “create” evidence (if none was available). It is interesting that the possible names of those involved in the Piltdown fake include Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Teilhard De Chardin, the priest-anthropologist and the leading British anthropologists of the day.

Lest we think that racism is an old hangover in anthropology, the same debate, even though in a different form, continues till today on human origins and the evolution of the races. The recent debate centres on the evolution of the homo sapiens (genus homo, species sapiens)-- or modern humanity -- to which all the current races belong. While the origin of humanity is clearly proven to be African, the “multi-regional” school (or the regional continuity model) propound that the races have evolved in parallel and separately from the early proto human ancestors in different continents, though with some cross-genetic flows. Thus, the ancient human beings -- the homo erectus -- spread to different continents about 2 million years back and have evolved since then into the current different races. The other view -- the “Out of Africa” school -- believes that successive waves of hominids -- the homo erectus and the homo sapiens being two of them -- have radiated out of Africa at different points of time. Thus, the homo sapiens have replaced the earlier human ancestors everywhere and homo sapiens (and therefore all the races) have a single origin. Thus Neanderthals, a hominid population in Europe may have evolved out of homo erectus there, but did not survive the competition with homo sapiens and did not leave their genes in the current European population.

At first sight it may appear that this is a debate strictly for anthropologists. However, the multi-regional school has amongst its propagators, Coon, an American anthropologist, who has this twist to the evolutionary debate. In his view, though humanity had a parallel evolution in different continents, they did not evolve at the same time -- the white Europeans got “sapienised” first, while the black Africans, last. While not all those belonging to the “Multi Regional” school are racists, this model undoubtedly lends itself to a racial interpretation more in line with an imperialist ideology. Coon is one of the favourite authors in white supremacists circles and therefore this is by no means an esoteric debate confined to academic circles -- it is closely related to race and class oppression.
The “Out of Africa” school has used genetic evidence to date the spread of homo sapiens to different continents. The evidence indicates that homo sapiens left Africa only a 100,000 years back: this is what makes their evidence so dangerous to racist ideology. Even the most die hard racists will find difficult to sustain that there are large evolutionary differences amongst races if the African ancestors are that close in time to white Europeans (or brown Asians). The myth of Aryan race is therefore exposed for what it is -- clearly a myth built to justify racial oppression and imperialism.

Soon after the Piltdown man was “discovered”, Raymond Dart in South Africa discovered the Taung skull in 1924. It showed a skull of approximately two million years that had a more human face but with a brain size similar to that of the chimpanzee. This was the precise opposite of the Piltdown skull -- a brain size similar to that of modern man and an ape like face. Dart named his find the Australopithecus Africanus or the southern ape. It was a shocking discovery because it was the oldest proto human fossil found anywhere and showed that intelligence was a later development. Though other finds were reported from South Africa which showed similar features, these were all challenged or disregarded based on the evidence of the Piltdown Man. Raymond Dart was to struggle for decades and even leaving his field of study due to the hostility with which his finding were being received in his peer group.

The interesting issue regarding the Piltdown Man is not why such a fraud was committed, but why the fraud was sustained for 50 years in the face of contrary evidence. That the scientific study of the human evolution was set back by 50 years due to one lone fossil speaks clearly of the ideological underpinnings of science, particularly when it impinges on current structures of power. The evidence for an African origin did not agree with the imperialist vision of superior races. A leisured elite glorifying superior intelligence as their unique hallmark was equally dismissive of the claim of labour in shaping human evolution. Thus Engels, when he propounded the role of labour in transformation of ape to man, was also making the simple point that labour and tool making abilities set humanity apart -- and it is this quality that is the driving force of evolution. The brain was the product and not the driving force of evolution. A view that was anathema to a class divided society built on the exploitation of labour. The Piltdown Man was their answer -- it “showed” that human intelligence developed before the two legged stance and the races had separated long back --the white races had evolved into superior beings.

The treatment of the Piltdown fraud in the history of science is also interesting. While all concerned books mention the fraud, very few mention even in passing why such a fraud was perpetrated and why was it sustained against all evidence. It was held to be an aberration in the history of science and an isolated incident. The same authors of course will spend reams of paper in decrying the role of Lysenko and ideology in Soviet Science. While Lysenko was undoubtedly a mistake in Soviet science, the even greater role of racist and class ideology in study of human evolution is passed over in silence. It was this anthropological theory of race origins combined with a pseudo Darwinian view of “survival of the fittest” that was used to justify the genocide of indigenous Americans, Africans and the Jews. As Africans and indigenous Americans were “inferior species,”  therefore they could be exterminated. Hitler’s contribution was only extending it to the Jewish population. All other elements were already in place before Hitler, sustained by so-called “scientific evidence”.

After the fall of the Piltdown Man, all anthropologists accepted Africa and Dart’s finds. It is ironic that while Dart was establishing the pre-eminence of Africa in human evolution, South Africa his adopted country, was embarking on the worst form of racial oppression. Dart remained a life long foe of apartheid and an ardent supporter of human rights in South Africa.

The next important fossil discovery was that of the skeleton of “Lucy” in 1974. She was still considered as a part of the ape family and named Australopithecus afarensis as she was found in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Here finally was the smoking gun evidence that walking preceded the evolution of the brain. Her brain size was similar to that of the chimpanzee but she was fully bipedal -- she walked on two legs. Here was the final evidence that laid to rest the ghost of the Piltdown Man. It was clear that intelligence evolved after our proto human ancestors took to walking and using their hands for tool making, much in the same way that Engels had proposed. Engels was wrong only about the mechanism of evolution -- he thought that acquired characteristics can be inherited -- he was a Lamarckian. The correct Darwinian position is that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited -- the process of evolution is much slower as nature does her weeding -- the survival of the fittest proceeds with only small genetic mutations or changes.

The fossil record can be open to various interpretations. However, molecular biology and genetic studies has now become a powerful tool in piecing together the evolutionary history of the homo sapiens. We have now evidence that chimpanzees and homo sapiens are closely related, sharing a common ancestor only about 5 to 7 million years ago. In fact, we are closer to the chimpanzees in genetic terms then the chimpanzees are to the gorillas -- the genetic difference is only 1.7% between homo sapiens and chimpanzees while that between the gorillas and the chimpanzees are about 3.5%. The degree of separation can be used to plot when the species separated and thus construct a timetable of evolution. From this we can see that we share a kinship with chimpanzees and gorillas that is much closer than their kinship with the other members of the ape family. The earlier view that the human ancestors separated from the apes long back has changed radically in the 80’s with this new genetic evidence.

The interesting development was that the Lucy find confirmed what molecular biology was telling us. Here was a species that was between the apes and humans and was there about three million years back. Clearly, her species had been walking for quite some time to evolve all the features necessary. Thus the break with the apes being only about five million years back was strikingly confirmed with fossil and genetic evidence. It also confirmed Darwin’s prediction that the human ancestor would be found in Africa, as all our closest kin -- the higher apes are in Africa.

The cradle of humanity being Africa was too clearly established to be challenged further. First the fossil record of homo habilis, and then homo erectus, clearly the ancestors of the homo sapiens was discovered in Africa. Many of the finds came from Olduvai gorge in Tanzania and were dated to about 2.5 million years. The Leakey’s  -- husband and wife and now their son have been excavating the fossil record there. Finally, the genus homo, of which sapiens is one of the species had arrived in the fossil record.

 It was no longer possible to dismiss the African origin of human kind. However, racism did not give up anthropology that easily. Thus, the next debate was to date the homo sapiens and their evolution. It is now established that homo erectus population used stone tools and moved into Asia about a million years back, possibly even earlier. The Neanderthals are an evolution that took place in Europe about 500,000 years back. In the multi regional model, the entire homo population moved in the direction of homo sapiens continuously, with some inter mixing -- the Neanderthal genes therefore would still be present in the European population. Thus, the picture that this school presents is one of directed evolution taking place simultaneously in all the continents. In this model, the divergences of the races are not recent but date back at least a million years.

While a number of reputed anthologists hold to this view of human evolution, this would make human population the exception than the rule in evolutionary history. Almost all evolutionary record of other species is different. One species arises and replaces others -- rarely do species evolve lock step and in a continuum. The Out of Africa model therefore is more in tune with general evolutionary history of all other species. In this theory, Homo sapiens have evolved 200,000 to 300,000 years back in Africa. They spread to the Eurasian continent only 100,000 years back. There are three bits of genetic evidence that Out of Africa model presents. One is that genetic divergence in African population is much more than any other -- this indicates that the other population groups have separated out from a common population much later. The second and third are two separate reconstruction of the time of the origin of the first male and female of the species. This has been done by studying the distinct genetic markers that are inherited from either the mother or the father. There is some genetic material that is exclusively passed on by the mother; similarly there is some genetic material that is inherited exclusively from the father. Both these exercises yield the same order of date -- the original “Eve” and the original “Adam” date back to about 200,000 years. They certainly do not go back a million years as required by the “multi regional” model.
As happens in science, the convergence of evidence from diverse fields is a strong confirmation of a theory. In a recent study, the fossils of the Java Man -- a set of homo erectus fossils found in Java -- were tested for age. The results are remarkable -- the earliest fossil was found to be about 1.8 million years old pushing back the date of the homo erectus emigration from Africa by almost a million years.  And the newest was found to be only 30,000 to 50,000 years old -- a complete blow to the regional continuity model that the homo erectus continuously evolved into the current human population. The Out of Africa model --  that the homo erectus population did not evolve into homo sapiens but were replaced by them -- appears to be again confirmed

The long shadow of scientific racism still haunts anthropology. In other disciplines too, such as psychometrics and evolutionary biology, attempts are made to find racial differences and propose genetic differences as the cause. This was one of Edward Wilson’s theories and important to his socio-biology. If the races have evolved from each other so closely in time, then their physical differences are exactly what they are -- physical differences to adapt to climatic variations. Nothing further can be read into them. An Out of Africa theory undermines one of the major tenets of imperialism -- the white races are superior and therefore rule the world. The truth, bitterly contested but still the truth, shows that races have little to do with innate human differences: they are just local adaptations to a hot or cold climate. Race is truly skin-deep.

The history of human evolution has always been deeply tainted by the politics of race. Initially, the reigning anthropologists argued that the races were virtually different species, descended independently from the apes -- the thesis of multiple origins of human kind. When this was found to be not tenable, they argued that the races had separated in the distant past and therefore had  large differences -- the white races therefore could be superior even if it had a common origin with other races. The attempt, of course, is to reflect through so called scientific theories the current structure of racial dominance and provide a legitimisation of imperialism. However, some recent findings in dating of the Java Man, a fossil of human ancestors found in Java, has put another nail in the coffin of such racial theorising.

The Java Man is a well known fossil of a human ancestor. It was thought to be about a million years old and one of the earliest such example found outside Africa. However, a recent attempt to use more precise dating of the Java Man and a group of fossils found near the original Java Man site and thought to be equally old, has come up with completely different dates. The earliest fossil is now thought to be 1.8 million years old, pushing back the emigration of the human ancestors out of Africa at least by another million years. However, the dating of the other fossils indicate that the some variant of the Java Man lived here till about 30,000 to 50,000 years back.

These dates a problem for the model of anthropological theory that believes that the races separated a million years back and have independently evolved into the current races. In this scheme, known as the regional continuity model,  though the races have a common African origin -- the proto human homo erectus -- they have evolved continuously over the last million years into the current races. To explain the large similarities in the genetic makeup of all races, they have argued that there have been some inter mixing and consequent genetic flows between the races. In other words, the regional continuity model accepts that there could be large differences between the races and also suggests that the Java Man would  have evolved into the current Javanese population. Obviously, a static Java Man poses a serious problem for this theory.

The other school, known as Out of Africa school, have shown through genetic evidence that modern man or homo sapiens, evolved in Africa about 250,000 years back and have replaced other species such as the Java Man and the Neanderthals in this period. Thus, the Java man did not evolve into the current Javanese population but was replaced by the more advanced homo sapiens. A population of homo erectus that did not evolve for nearly 2 million years is of course another piece of evidence for the Out of Africa School and quite damning for the regional continuity model.

There is a view of science as an objective enterprise divorced from the social realities. While this is largely true for the natural sciences, it is quite different in scientific areas that impact the current structures of power. Colonialism from 16th century onwards committed large scale racial genocide. The original population of America -- both north and south -- was decimated. Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas is counted as a great human achievement and lauded in the history books. What is not mentioned is that in a scant hundred  years, the entire estimated half a million Haitian population living then was brutally slaughtered. A similar fate followed the indigenous people all over the Americas. Similarly, an estimated 80 million were killed or shipped out of Africa as slaves in the 350 years that African slave trade lasted. It was the loot of India and the slave trade from Africa that provided the initial capital for the industrial revolution in Britain. While initially, religion was used to justify such slaughter of the “non believers”, from the 19th century, science was increasingly asked to play the same role. Thus, the 19th century saw the rise of “scientific” racism in which it was argued using “scientific” data that the white races were superior and therefore was the “fittest” in the Darwinian sense. Racial genocide now had the sanction of science.

Lest we think that such racial theories were scientific aberrations, we must note that this was the dominant view of almost all the leading anthropologists and anatomists of the day. Brocca, Huxley, Cuvier, the leading lights of their times, all subscribed to the views that the black races were closer to the chimpanzees than the Caucasians. Even Charles Darwin, the founder of the theory of evolution, was not uncomfortable with the extinction of the Negro and the indigenous Australian population. Matt Cartmill, a leading American anthropolgist, in a recent article in the magazine Discover summed this up as “Many scientists (of that period) regarded the native people of Africa, Autralia and the New World as living fossils: leftovers from the earlier stages, doomed by Nature’s iron laws of competition to go down to extinction with the Tasmanian wolf and the Tasminian aborgines.” In other words, racial genocide was simply nature’s law -- this was the implicit argument of scientific racism. As Africans and indigenous Americans were “inferior species,”  therefore they could be exterminated. Hitler’s contribution was only extending this logic to the Jewish population. All other elements were already in place before Hitler, sustained by so called the “science” of race.

The acceptance of an African origin for humanity was not without a bitter struggle. Raymond Dart, the anthropologist who had discovered the first proto human fossils in Africa, had at one point given up anthropology in the face of bitter hostility from the then reigning anthropological establishment. In an attempt to delay the acceptance of an African origin, an anathema to the prevailing scientific orthodoxy, even a deliberate fraud was committed. The Piltdown Man, a fake fossil “found” in England, was used to deny an African origin. Only after it was exposed as a fake, did the scientists accept the overwhelming evidence for an African origin.
Eve though the opposition to African origin had to be given up, the new argument that came up is that  while  the human ancestors came from Africa, the races separated about a million years back and have evolved continuously since then from the early human ancestors into modern man everywhere. In the regional continuity model, the entire homo population moved in the direction of homo sapiens or modern humanity continuously, albeit with some inter mixing. In this scheme, therefore, the Neanderthal genes would still be present in the European population even if the Neanderthals did not survive. Thus, the picture that this school presents is one of directed evolution taking place simultaneously in all the continents. While a number of reputed anthologists hold to the regional continuity model of human evolution, this would make human population the exception than the rule in evolutionary history. Almost all evolutionary record of other species is different. One species arises and replaces others -- rarely do species evolve lock step and in a continuum as demanded by the regional continuity model.

At first sight it may appear that the debate between the regional continuity school and Out of Africa school is strictly for anthropologists. Certainly, all anthropologists belonging to the regional continuity model are not racists, even though it lends itself more easily to a racist interpretation. For instance, the regional continuity school has amongst its propagators, Carleton Coon, an American anthropologist, who has this twist to the evolutionary debate. In his view, though humanity had a parallel evolution in different continents, they did not evolve at the same time -- the white Europeans got “homo sapienised” first, while the black Africans, last. Coon is one of the favourite authors in white supremacists circles and therefore this is by no means an esoteric debate confined to academic circles -- it is closely related to race and class oppression.

The “Out of Africa” school has used genetic evidence to date the spread of homo sapiens to different continents. The evidence indicates that homo sapiens left Africa only a 100,000 years back: this is what makes their evidence so dangerous to racist ideology. Even the most die hard racists will find difficult to sustain that there are large evolutionary differences amongst races if the African ancestors are that close in time to white Europeans (or brown Asians). The myth of Aryan race is therefore exposed for what it is -- clearly a myth built to justify racial oppression and imperialism.

The Out of Africa model, therefore, is more in tune with general evolutionary history of all other species. In this theory, homo sapiens first evolved 200,000 to 300,000 years back in Africa. They spread to the Eurasian continent only about a 100,000 years back. There are three bits of genetic evidence that Out of Africa model presents. One is that genetic divergence in the African population is much more than in any other -- this indicates that the other population groups have separated out from a common population much later. The second and third are two separate reconstruction of the time of the origin of the first male and female of the species. This has been done by studying the distinct genetic markers that are inherited from either the mother or the father. There is some genetic material that is exclusively passed on by the mother; similarly there is some genetic material that is inherited exclusively from the father. Both these exercises yield the same order of date -- the original “Eve” and the original “Adam” date back to about 200,000 years. They certainly do not go back a million years as required by the “regional continuity” model.

As happens in science, the convergence of evidence from diverse fields is a strong confirmation of a theory The recent study of the fossils of the Java Man  that the earliest fossil is about 1.8 million years old the newest only 30,000 to 50,000 years old is another blow to the regional continuity model that the homo erectus continuously evolved into the current human population. The Out of Africa model --  that the homo erectus population remained static and did not evolve into homo sapiens but were replaced by them -- appears to be again confirmed

It is interesting to note that while scientific racism and the myth of the Aryan race became difficult to justify, at least publicly in the West after Hitler’s gas chambers, it strikes a peculiar resonance in the RSS and their cohorts. Golwalkar’s approving reference to Hitler stemmed also from the similarity of their views on the superiority of the Aryan race. Thus, time after time, attempts are made to appropriate all the of Indian past for the greater glory of the Aryans. The Harappan civilisation is the most obvious target as it is one of the four ancient civilisations. This has a two fold purpose. One is of course that if the Aryans had indeed built the Harappan civilisation, one can argue that the “superior” Aryan race originated from India, pushing India up the racial ladder. The other is that the Hindi-Hindu-Hindu Raj slogan of the RSS instinctively places them in North India. Therefore to find that the Dravidians -- identified in their minds with South India -- had built a civilisation that the Aryans could not rival for another 1000 years, is a source of acute discomfort. A more reasoned view that there are no Dravidian and Aryan races in India -- only Indo-Aryan and Dravidian group of languages -- do not appeal to the RSS, conditioned as they are by 19th century racial theories and their instinctive identification with the Aryan race.

The long shadow of  scientific racism  still haunts anthropology. In other disciplines too, such as psychometrics and evolutionary biology, attempts are made to find racial differences and propose genetic differences as the cause. This was one of Edward Wilson’s theories and important to his socio-biology. If the races have evolved from each other so closely in time, then their physical differences are exactly what they are -- physical differences to adapt to climatic variations. Nothing further can be read into them. An Out of Africa theory undermines one of the major tenets of imperialism -- the white races are superior and therefore rule the world. The truth, bitterly contested but still the truth, shows that races have little to do with innate human differences: they are just local adaptations to a hot or cold climate. Race is truly skin deep.