Carleton S. Coon

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...