Early Human Genetics as the Unanthropology

In the early twentieth century, Franz Boas transformed Amer-

ican anthropology in large part by infusing it with the German

liberal humanism of Rudolf Virchow. Virchow was distrustful

of naturalistic theories of human history, in particular those

of his former assistant Ernst Haeckel (1876 [1868]). Haeckel’s

evolutionary theory held the “Indo-Germanic” branch of the

Mediterranean (i.e., Caucasian) race to be the highest form

of life and aggressively dehumanized the rest of the human

species in Darwin’s name:

Of course the relative number of the twelve species [of peo-

ple] fluctuates every year, and that too according to the law

developed by Darwin, that in the struggle for life the more

highly developed, the more favoured and larger group of

forms,