Types of Mankind
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Types of Mankind (1854) is a book by Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon.
It has been described as a monumental tribute to Samuel George Morton's work and carried Morton's ideas further and claimed and backed up his findings which supported the notion of polygenism, which claims that humanity originates from different lineages and is the ancestor of the multiregional hypothesis.
In their book, Nott and Gliddon argued that the races of mankind occupied distinct zoological provinces and did not originate from a single pair, they both believed God had created each race and positioned each race in separate provinces. The doctrine of zoological provinces outlined in Types of Mankind did not allow for superiority of one type of race over another, each type was suited to its own province, and was superior in its own area. Nott claimed that because races were created in different provinces, that each race types must be of equal antiquity. However Nott and other polygenists such as Gliddon believed that the biblical Adam means "to show red in the face" or "blusher"; since only light skinned people can blush, then the biblical Adam must be of the Caucasian race.
Nott persistently attacked the scientific basis of the Bible and also rejected the theory of evolution, claiming that the environment does not change any organism into another, and also rejecting common descent. Nott believed monogenism was "absurd" and had no biblical or scientific basis. He pointed to excavations in Egypt which depicted animals and humans as they looked today to refute monogenism and evolution. According to Nott, the monuments and artifacts found in Egypt show us that the "White, Mongolian and Negro existed at least five thousand years ago". Nott claimed that this proved beyond dispute that each race had been created separately.
Nott claimed that the writers of the Bible had no knowledge of any races except themselves and their immediate neighbors, and that the Bible does not concern the whole of the earth's population. According to Nott there are no verses in the Bible which support monogenism and that the only passage the monogenists use is Acts 17:26, but according to Nott the monogenists are wrong in their interpretation of that verse because the "one blood" of Paul's sermon only includes the nations he knew existed, which were local.
