From Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin © AMNH
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From Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin © AMNH |
Newly employed by the American Museum of Natural History, Roy Chapman Andrews regularly loitered near a meteorite display just to cast a furtive glance at Henry Fairfield Osborn as he passed on his way to lunch. Andrews didn't suspect that, years later, the intimidating man would become his staunchest supporter.
The wealthy, articulate Osborn was appointed vertebrate paleontologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1891, he joined AMNH, when the museum jointly hired him with Columbia University. Besides Andrews, Osborn assembled a stellar collection of fossil hunters and preparators, including Charles Sternberg and Barnum Brown. In 1908, Osborn succeeded Morris K. Jesup (the man who hired him) as president of AMNH, becoming the first scientist to hold the post. He remained until 1933, making his employer one of the foremost natural history museums in the world. He was a prolific author as well as a member of prestigious scientific societies, and he had an ego to match.
Like his predecessors, Osborn compared fossil remains with those of living animals, but he also innovated, encouraging his staff to make small-scale models of dinosaur skeletons to understand the range of possible motion and the necessary musculature. He hired Charles R. Knight to make murals and sculptures of ancient life. Osborn felt his highest calling was to educate "a very large class of inquisitive but wholly uninformed people." It was Osborn who authorized a series of AMNH expeditions to Mongolia during the roaring 20s.
 From Man Rises to Parnassus by Henry Fairfield Osborn |
The legacy that Osborn left to the study of human origins was not altogether shiny. He readily debated William Jennings Bryan (the prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey Trial) but the evidence Osborn pointed to was a tooth from a "human ancestor" found in Nebraska, a tooth that really belonged to a peccary. He was an evolutionist, but he held a very different view of evolution than Darwin. Osborn believed that a very human-like ancestor preceded modern humans by some 30 million years. He also believed — firmly — that this ancestor arose in Asia. To his credit, he made a well-reasoned rejection of arguments that modern humans arose in Western Europe, pointing out that Europe had been exhaustively searched for human remains and artifacts for a century, whereas Asia had not. But he wouldn't consider the possibility that our ancestors arose in Africa, and he completely ignored Raymond Dart's discovery of the Taung Child. Osborn's writings on race make his reasons clear.
Osborn had the tremendously bad luck to write his manifesto, Man Rises to Parnassus, after Piltdown Man was found but before the find was debunked. He described the discovery of the faked fossil as "almost a miracle," recanting his own initial doubts about Piltdown. He went on to compare the size of the braincase of Piltdown Man with that of a modern Aboriginal Australian. Osborn found Aborigines so primitive that he saw fit to compare their brains to those of Java Man (now named Homo erectus), and he indicated regions of those brains, shown at right, with an almost amusing confidence.
Harder for a modern reader to forgive in Man Rises to Parnassus are Osborn's notions about the origins of different races. Racism certainly didn't originate with Osborn (or with evolutionary theory), but he tried to give scientific-sounding reasons for deep racial divides.
We now subdivide Homo sapiens into three or more absolutely distinct stocks, which in zoology would be given the rank of species, if not of genera; these stocks are popularly known as the Caucasian, the Mongolian, and the Negroid. . . . The spiritual, intellectual, moral, and physical characters which separate these three great human stocks are very profound and ancient. . . . man goes forth to seek and labor for food. He may go to the temperate regions, to the North Pole, or to the Equator. If he chooses the Equator the quest for food is very easy and requires relatively little intelligence; the environment is not conducive to rapid or varied organic selection; the struggle for mere existence is not very keen; the social and tribal evolution is very slow; intellectual and spiritual development is at a standstill. Here we have the environmental conditions which have kept many branches of the Negroid race in a state of arrested brain development.
Osborn was confident that he could discern the race of long-dead artists, simply by examining the artistic merits of their work.
All this art . . . appears to be the product of a single racial mind and racial spirit. . . . in the orderly development of a single art — an art marked by the combined love of beauty and truth — we have the most positive proofs of the craftsmanship of a single race. That race was probably of the pure or mixed Cro-Magnon type.
People of color should not feel singled out for scrutiny, however. Osborn (like plenty of people at that time) not only found white better than black, but also Western civilization better than Eastern, and Nordic stock better than Mediterranean. In fact, he categorized Europeans with impressive taxonomic specificity.
The most ancient ethnic element in the population of Brittany is the broad-headed, gray-eyed Alpines or Celts, short of stature, very Irish in appearance, but without the excitable Irish temperament.
Osborn lamented what he saw as a decline in the human race . . .
The rise of primitive and of uncivilized man is subject to the same laws as those which prevail throughout the animal kingdom, until human civilization steps in and interferes with the natural orders of things. Thus when man begins to specialize and human races begin to intermingle, Nature loses control. It appears that the finest races of man, like the finest races of lower animals, arose when Nature had full control, and that civilized man is upsetting the divine order of human origin and progress. . . . In America the original pioneer stock is dying out; the foreign element is in the ascendency. . . . Purity of race is today found in but one nation — the Scandinavian; but Scandinavia has been seriously bled by emigration.
. . . and he proposed a solution.
Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer — this must be the keynote of our future. This was the guiding principle which underlay all the discussions of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921.
Jim Crow segregation laws were already in effect in the American South. Thanks to the eugenics movement, those laws were supplemented with immigration quotas, asylum admissions, incarcerations and forced sterilizations. In the 21st century, a better understanding of the human genome has shown that greater divisions exist within races than between them, a finding that would probably have amazed — if not enraged — Henry Fairfield Osborn.
For more information:
Man Rises to Parnassus by Henry Fairfield Osborn
Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston
Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin
Java Man by Swisher, Curtis and Lewin
Dragon Hunter by Charles Gallenkamp
The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White
The Reign of the Dinosaurs by Jean-Guy Michard
The Man Who Found the Missing Link by Pat Shipman
Bone Wars by Tom Rea
Evolution's Workshop by Edward J. Larson
Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated August 21, 2005