ANTA01H3 Chapter 13: Chapter 13-Human Variation and Adaption
Document Summary
In the sixteenth century, after the european discovery of the new world, several western european countries embarked on a period of intense exploration and colonization in both the new and old worlds. One result of this contact was an increased awareness of human diversity: throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, european and. American scientists concentrated primarily on describing and classifying the biological variation in humans as well as in nonhuman species. The first scientific attempt to describe variation among human populations was linnaeus" taxonomic classification, which placed humans into four separate categories. Linnaeus assigned behavioral and intellectual qualities to each group, with the least complimentary descriptions going to sub-saharan, dark-skinned africans. Blumenbach also used criteria other than skin color, but acknowledged that his system had limitations. For example, he emphasized that categories based on skin color were arbitrary and that many traits, including skin color, weren"t discrete phenomena because their expression often overlapped between groups.
