Negroid Totally Explained

Everything about Negroid totally explained

Negroid is an adjective derived from the term Negro and refers to a presumed race of people mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. These people are now generally referred to as Congoids, Africans or Black Africans.

Origin of the term

The term has its etymological roots in the Latin word niger (black), with the earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" in 1859. In modern use, the term is associated with "the division of humankind represented by the indigenous peoples of central and southern Africa".

Objection to use of the term

The term Negroid is commonly associated with outdated notions of racial typology which have been widely discredited in scientific circles This mirrors the decline in usage of the term Negro, which fell out of favor following the campaigns of the American civil rights movement — the term Negro became associated with periods of legalized discrimination, and was rejected by African Americans during the 1960s for Black. for those people formerly termed Negroid. Afrocentrists have suggested the existence of a larger Africoid race including also other groups besides Congoids, for example, the Hamitics (formerly generally regarded by Europeans as part of the Caucasian race), the Capoids, Australoids, and Dravidians. '
Most people nowadays simply use the term African or Black African to avoid being labeled politically incorrect.

Use in physical anthropology

In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humans — Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans are divisible into broad sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology. Such classifications remain in use today in the fields of anthropology and forensics to help identify the ethnicity, lineage and origin of human remains. For example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza freely uses the term in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes to distinguish between various groups that have inhabited and do inhabit Africa. Later extensions, such as Carleton S. Coon's "Origin of Races" placed this theory in an evolutionary context — Coon divided the species homo sapiens into five groups, Caucasoid, Capoid, Congoid, Australoid, and Mongoloid, based on his belief of their date of evolution from homo erectus. Labeling Congoids the "African Negroes" and "Pygmies", he divided indigenous Africans into these two distinct groups based on their date of origin, and loosened classification from mere appearance — however, this led to disagreement between approaches to dating divergence, and consequent conflicting results.
These theories were quickly criticized on the basis that such "sorting criteria" don't (in general) produce meaningful results, and that evolutionary divergence was extremely improbable over the given time-frames. As Monatagu (1963) said, However, even this system of classification has been criticized for only working in the situations such as the United States, where the populations are derived from geographically distant locations. For example, a recent study of ancient Nubian crania concluded:

Views of anthropologist Vincent Sarich

Vincent Sarich, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California defines race as "populations...within a species that are separated geographically from other such populations...and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features." With 73 appropriate DNA markers, according to Sarich, it's possible to state with close to 100 percent accuracy whether the ancestors of the individual who supplied them came from Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Americas. Sarich notes that the latest data suggest the migrations from Africa began only around 50,000 years ago. Then, pointing to the observed heritable differences among the resulting populations--differences not only in skin color but also in body size, cranial capacity and brain size, intelligence, physical ability, and personality--he argues that so much adaptation in so little time means that racial differences had to be enormously important for survival. The differences were not trivial, and couldn't have been driven by chance.

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