1/13/2024 0 Comments Glimpses lost tribe jewish indiaThe obvious question was what had happened to these white conquerors? Explorers, scientists, and colonial officials invented explanations. By the turn of the 20th century, it was lodged firmly within the fields of linguistics, physical anthropology, and, among African scholars, history and archaeology. Still, these voices of dissent barely impacted the seductive idea of the ancient white invasion. Was it a superficial attribute of skin and hair or did it touch the deeper qualities of temperament and intellect? Finally, there were doubters-the most prominent of whom was Charles Darwin-who thought that the homeland of the human species lay elsewhere, probably in Africa. Scientists also disagreed about the extent of racial difference. How human races were related-if they were related-remained a matter of debate in the 19th century. Not all scientists subscribed to these theories. Egyptologists called it the “Dynastic Race Theory.” Linguists described it as the “Aryan Invasion Theory.” Among European anthropologists, it was called the “Nordic Race Theory.” While each of these theories had its own variations, they all promoted the idea that a light-skinned, racially superior population left its ancestral homeland to conquer Europe, Africa, and Asia in the ancient past. Among scholars of Africa, it was called the “Hamitic Hypothesis,” after Ham, son of Noah, who was mistakenly identified as the common ancestor of all African peoples. That idea that a white race had once existed in Central Asia and left home to conquer the world was not popularized merely by zealots and xenophobes, but also by leading members of the scientific community. By the late 19th century, this ancient people of Central Asia had been given a name: Aryans. Ararat, the Biblical site of the homeland for those who survived the Flood, gave weight to the idea that humanity first emerged in Central Asia then migrated outward to populate other regions of the world. That such a homeland was close to the Caucasus-as in Blumenbach’s hypothesis-as well as Mt. Finding structural similarities among ancient languages of the West (Latin, Celtic, Ancient Greek) and the East (Old Persian, Sanskrit) he posited an early homeland for humankind somewhere in the lands that lay between. This idea was bolstered by British scholar William Jones, who believed he had unearthed evidence of an original human type from his study of languages. The lost tribes grew out of the Blumenbach’s central theory: that Caucasians were the original human type, a form that changed-or, in his word, “degenerated”-into other racial forms as Caucasians migrated from an ancestral homeland in the Caucasus Mountains to other areas of the world where they encountered the effects of new climates. While none of these clans proved to be white in the racial sense intended by explorers, the legacy of these “lost tribes” continues to quietly but indelibly shape the lives of millions of people from Rwanda to India. Supporting the hierarchical theories of the new “race science” took work, which can be seen in the strange-and retrospectively unbelievable-discoveries of lost white tribes that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Taken from the body of an unnamed Georgian woman in the Caucasus, Blumenbach’s favorite skull became the basis of his “Caucasian” race, and with that, a scientific typology of whiteness was born. While he thought these varieties-which he called “races” in 1795-were more or less equal in character and intelligence, Blumenbach ranked them in terms of what he saw as their physical perfection. “My beautiful typical head of a young Georgian female,” he wrote, “always of itself attracts every eye.”īlumenbach kindled scientific interest in whiteness when he claimed to have found five distinct varieties of humankind in his collection. 18th-century German anatomist Johann Blumenbach kept a collection of 250 human skulls, but he found one skull particularly enchanting.
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