Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that humans are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity. Modern scientific views find little merit in any polygenic model due to an increased understanding of speciation in a human context, with the monogenic "Out of Africa" hypothesis and its variants being the most widely accepted models without supporting evidence of later archaeological sites for human origins. Polygenism has historically been heavily used in service of white supremacist ideas and practices, disproving a common origin between European and non-European peoples by considering archaeological evidence found from modern day DNA sequences comparing hominid species and modern humans. It can be distinguished between Biblical polygenism, describing a Pre-Adamite or Co-Adamite origin of certain races in the context of the Genesis narrative of Adam and Eve, and scientific polygenism, attempting to find a taxonomic basis for ideas of racial science.
Origins
Many oral traditions feature polygenesis in their creation stories. For example, Bambuti mythology and other creation stories from the pygmies of Congo state that the supreme God of the pygmies, Khonvoum, created three different races of humans separately out of three kinds of clay: one black, one white, and one red.Mbiti, John, African Religions & philosophy, Heinemann, 1990, p. 91. In some cultures, polygenism in the creation narrative served an etiological function. These narratives provided an explanation as to why other people groups exist who are not affiliated with their tribe. Moreover, distinctions made between the creation of foreign people groups and the tribe or ethnic group to which the creation myth pertains served to reinforce tribal or ethnic unity, the need to exercise wariness and caution when dealing with outsiders, or the unique nature of the relationship between that tribe and the deities of their religious system.
An example may be found in the creation myth of the Asmat people, a hunter-gatherer tribe situated along the south-western coast of New Guinea. This creation myth asserts that the Asmat themselves came into being when a deity placed carved wooden statues in a ceremonial house and began to beat a drum. The statues became living humans and began to dance. Some time later, a great crocodile attempted to attack this ceremonial house, but was defeated by the power of the deity. The crocodile was cut into several pieces and these were tossed in different directions. Each piece became one of the foreign tribes known to the Asmat.Feder, Kenneth L.; Michael Alan Park, Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archaeology, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1989, pp. 3-4.
The idea is also found in some ancient Greek and Roman literature. For example, the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women.Julian, Letter to a Priest, trans. WC Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, 3 vols. LCL, Cambridge, Mass., 1913-23. In his Against the Galileans Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germani and the Scythians (northern nations) were different in their bodies (i.e. complexion and other traits) to the Ethiopians. He therefore could not imagine such difference in physical attributes as having originated from common ancestry, and so maintained separate creations for different races.
In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants of the antipodes (Antichthones). These inhabitants were considered by some to have separate origins because of their geographical extremity.Flint, Valeria, Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle Ages and Enlightenment, Viator, Vol. 15, 1984, pp. 65-80.
The religion of the Ainu people claims that the ancestors of the Ainu people arrived on Earth from the skies separate from the other races. See Ainu creation myth.
Main beliefs
In their respective fundamentalist or Orthodox sects, Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims have embraced monogenism in the form that all modern humans ultimately are descended from a single mating pair, named Adam and Eve. In this context, polygenism described all alternative explanations for the origin of humankind that involved more than two individual "first people". This definition of polygenism is still employed among some Creationists and within the Roman Catholic Church (see Humani generis).
With the development of the evolutionary paradigm of human origins, it has become widely held within the scientific community that at no point did there exist a single "first man" and a single "first woman" who constituted the first true humans to whom all lineages of modern humans ultimately converge and that if Adam and Eve ever existed as distinct historical persons, they were members of a much larger population of the same species.Tenesa, P. Navarro, B. J. Hayes et al. "Recent Human Effective Population Size Estimated from Linkage Disequilibrium," Genome Research 17 (2007), pp. 520–6 However, a common scientific explanation of human origins asserts that the population directly ancestral to all modern humans remained united as a single population by constant gene flow. Therefore, on the level of the entire human population, this explanation of human origin is classified as monogenism. All modern humans share the same origin from this single ancestral population.
Modern polygenists do not accept either theological or scientific monogenism. They believe that the variation among human racial types cannot be accounted for by monogenism or by evolutionary processes occurring since the proposed recent African origin of modern humans. Polygenists reject the argument that human races must belong to a single species because they can interbreed. There are several polygenist hypotheses, including biblical creationist polygenism and polygenist evolution.David N. Livingstone, Adam's ancestors: race, religion, and the politics of human origins, 2008John P. Jackson, Nadine M. Weidman Race, Racism, and science: social impact and interaction, Rutgers University Press, 2005
The Bible To make polygenism compatible with the Biblical account in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, some argument is needed to the effect that what is in the Bible is incomplete. Three standard positions are:
Pre-Adamism; Co-Adamism;For pre-Adamism and co-Adamism, see Livingstone, David, The Preadamite Theory and the Marriage of Science and Religion, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 82, No. 3, 1992, p. 63. incompleteness of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
In Christian terms, polygenesis remained an uncommon Biblical interpretation until the mid-19th century, and was largely considered heretical; however, it has been pointed out by some modern scholars that, while Pre-Adamism was strongly rejected by most and deemed heretical, Co-Adamism was not received with the same degree of hostility.Livingstone, p. 10.
A major reason for the emergence of Biblical polygenism from around the 18th century was because it became noted that the number of races could not have developed within the commonly accepted Biblical timeframe. Francis Dobbs (1750–1811), an eccentric member of the Irish Parliament, believed in a different kind of biblical polygenism. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair between Eve and the Devil (see Serpent Seed).
Polygenism was heavily criticized in the early 20th century by the Roman Catholic Church, and especially by Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani generis (1950), on the grounds that polygenism is incompatible with the doctrine of Original Sin.
Pre-Adamism
Pre-Adamism claims there were already races of humans living before the creation of Adam. It traces back to Isaac La Peyrère in the 17th century.
Co-Adamism Co-Adamism claims that there was more than one Adam – small groups of men, created at the same time in different places across the Earth – and therefore that the different races were separately created. The idea of co-Adamism has been traced back as far as Paracelsus in 1520. Other 16th century advocates of co-Adamism included Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh, who theorised a different origin for the Native Americans.Livingstone, p. 22.
In 1591 Giordano Bruno argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, then God must have either created separate Adams or Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races.
An anonymous Biblical paper supporting co-Adamism was published in 1732 entitled Co-adamitae or an Essay to Prove the Two Following. Paradoxes, viz. I. That There Were Other Men Created at the Same time with Adam, and II. That the Angels did not fall.Livingstone, p. 10
Henry Home, Lord Kames was a believer in co-Adamism.Livingstone, p. 14 Home believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches of the History of Man in 1774 Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.John P. Jackson, Nadine M. Weidman Race, Racism, and science: social impact and interaction, Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 39 - 41
Charles White was another advocate of co-Adamism, although he used less theology to support his views.Livingstone, p. 15. White's Account of the Regular Gradation in Man in 1799, provided the empirical science for polygenism. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's interfertility argument: the theory that only the same species can interbreed – pointing to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed.
Charles Hamilton Smith, a naturalist from England, was a polygenist: he believed races had been created separately. He published the book The Natural History of the Human Species in 1848. In the book he maintained that there had always been three fundamentally distinct human types: the Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negro. He also referred to the polygenist Samuel George Morton's work in America.Gustav Jahoda, Crossroads Between Culture and Mind: Continuities and Change in Theories of Human Nature, 1993, p. 93 Samuel Kneeland wrote an 84-page introduction to the American edition of the book where he laid out evidence which supports polygenist creationism and that the Bible is entirely compatible with multiple Adams.David N. Livingstone, Adam's ancestors: race, religion, and the politics of human origins, 2008, pp. 97-99
John William Colenso, a theologian and biblical scholar, was a polygenist who believed in co-Adamism. Colenso pointed to monuments and artifacts in Egypt to debunk monogenist beliefs that all races came from the same stock. For example, Ancient Egyptian representations of races showed exactly how the races looked in his time. Egyptological evidence indicated the existence of remarkable permanent differences in the shape of the skull, bodily form, colour and physiognomy between different races which are difficult to reconcile with biblical monogenesis. Colenso believed that racial variation between races was so great, that there was no way in which all the races could have come from the same stock just a few thousand years ago. He was unconvinced that climate could change racial variation and also believed, in common with other biblical polygenists, that monogenists had interpreted the Bible wrongly.Colin Kidd, The forging of races: race and scripture in the Protestant Atlantic world, 1600 - 2000, 2006, pp. 153-156