Giuseppe Sergi – The ‘Father’ of Modern Physical Anthropology
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| Giuseppe Sergi |
By Niccolò Graffio
Charles Darwin has been (rightfully) called one of the most influential figures in human history. His thesis on evolution as expounded in his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) upended the international scientific community, founded the science of evolutionary biology and changed the way we look at ourselves as a species forever.
While many scientists by this time were open to various explanations concerning the origins of life due to the diversity of so many species (and the fossil record), Darwin’s ideas were nothing less than revolutionary! As one might expect, his theory concerning the origins and complexities of life were not immediately and readily accepted.
The core thesis to Darwin’s idea of natural selection was that new species arose as a result of gradual changes to existing ones over time due to changes in the environment. Each species’ members possessed a variety of traits and they continuously struggled for survival to capitalize existing resources which were finite. Those who possessed the traits most favored under existing circumstances were most likely to survive to pass those traits on to their offspring. Darwin stressed these processes were totally random.
This set Darwin at odds with some of the leading thinkers, both scientific and theological, of his time. Richard Owen, the leading naturalist in the United Kingdom of Darwin’s day, attacked Darwin’s idea of natural selection, holding that while the idea of new species arising from old was plausible these were “ordained births” rather than the culmination of random events.
If Darwin’s ideas were initially greeted with skepticism if not outright hostility from many quarters in his native Britain, things were only worse elsewhere. They initially had little impact in France, where any biologists who accepted evolution embraced variations of the ideas set down by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own theory of evolution emphasized what he termed “soft inheritance,” that is, an organism passing down to future generations’ traits it acquired during its lifetime. In America Darwin’s defenders ran up against those who sided with Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz, who among other things believed in the concept of polygenism, the idea that each human race had a distinct origin rather than a shared ancestry.
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| Charles Darwin |
Italy, long the bastion of the Roman Catholic Church, likewise greeted Darwin’s ideas with great skepticism, yet he did have his defenders there, as well. This article is dedicated to the most prominent among them, a man who has been rightfully called Italy’s “champion of Darwinism”.
Giuseppe Sergi was born in the city of Messina, Sicily on March 20, 1841. Information on his childhood is scant. An avid intellectual, he first studied law before switching over to linguistics and philosophy. At the age of 19 he joined Garibaldi during the latter’s expedition to Sicily. Ever learning, after this he studied physics and anatomy. He eventually majored in racial anthropology, studying under the infamous physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso.
For a time after completing his studies he worked as a secondary school teacher in Milan, where he held a position in theoretical philosophy. In 1880 he was appointed to a position as Professor of Anthropology at the prestigious University of Bologna, the oldest continuously operating university in the world!
The following year the noted Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli called him up to become a member of the editorial board of Rivista di filosofia scientifica (It: “Journal of Scientific Philosophy”), at the time the leading journal of Italian Positivism. That same year he also edited the Italian version of The Data of Ethics by the prominent English philosopher, anthropologist, biologist, sociologist and classical liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).
In 1884 he obtained a position at the University of Rome. Rome had recently been established as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. At this time Anthropology was considered part of the Literature Faculty. During his time at the University of Rome, Sergi established the Laboratory of Anthropology and Psychology to, among other things “wean” Anthropology from Literature and make it a science in its own right. He eventually succeeded in becoming Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Rome, La Sapienza. Here he founded Italy’s first true anthropological museum.
To be sure, Sergi was not the only person in Italy at this time doing groundbreaking research in the nascent field of physical anthropology. Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) of Florence and Giustiniano Nicolucci (1819-1904) of Naples likewise made important contributions, but of the three, Sergi would become the most prominent both nationally and internationally.
Sergi continued to make his mark on the anthropological sciences in Italy. In 1893, for example, he started the Società Romana di Antropologia (the name was later changed to Istituto Italiano di Antropologia). In addition to this, he also started the the publication of the Proceedings of the Society, entitled Atti della Società Romana di Antropologia (1893-1910; later Rivista di Antropologia, 1911-2003, and now Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 2004- ). This journal tried to introduce innovative trends in anthropological investigations through interdisciplinary approaches.
Sergi had been mentored by Mantegazza for about 20 years. Shortly after founding the Società Romana di Antropologia, he broke with Mantegazza, for reasons more professional than personal.
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| Cesare Lombroso |
Likewise, Sergi broke with his colleague Cesare Lombroso for similar reasons. Lombroso was the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, a school of thought that set forth the proposition that many criminals were born rather than made. Lombroso termed these types “atavistic born criminals”. In his earliest writings he viewed them as a type of human sub-species. In his later writings he came to regard them as examples of arrested development and degeneracy.
According to him, it could be possible to identify these types by taking detailed measurements of the human skull. Sergi opposed him for several reasons. For starters, Lombroso claimed that Southern Italians were much more disposed to this ‘atavism’ than Northern ones. This claim was widely used by Northerners as justification for their subjugation and disenfranchisement of Southerners. Sergi held fast to his claim that Southerners, being Mediterraneans, were a naturally gifted people who while perhaps predisposed to greater emotional volatility, were nonetheless hardly an “inferior” people. He also took issue with Lombroso using craniometric measurements in an effort to identify criminals, which he felt was unscientific.
While Cesare Lombroso’s views were generally accepted among Northern Italians, outside of Italy they generated mostly skepticism if not outright disapproval. The exception was the United States, where Anglo-American Nordicists incorporated them into their ideology. Shortly before World War I the pioneering British criminologist Charles Buckman Goring, under the sponsorship of the British government did a large-scale study of over 3,000 English convicts in order to determine if there was, in fact, any truth to Lombroso’s assertions. Collecting and analyzing data bearing upon 96 different physical traits in each of the convicts, he came to the conclusion that “There is no such thing as an anthropological criminal type.” The results of this study would be later published in his magnum opus “The English Convict: a statistical study” (1913). Other later studies would likewise contradict Lombroso’s assertion. In spite of this, many of his claims still survive among fringe groups.
The discipline of anthropology at this time was rather unspecialized and would continue to remain so in Italy until after World War I. Paolo Mantegazza, like Cesare Lombroso and Sergi, leaned more towards the medical-biological aspects of the field rather than the philological-linguistic ones. Where Sergi differed from his mentor, however, was that while Mantegazza favored a more centralist attitude, zeroing in on its purely biomedical aspects, Sergi also took into account the environmental and historical-cultural influences on individuals, populations and races.
Where he remained in harmony with this former mentor, however, was his belief the analysis and classification of the human skull to be of primary importance in establishing the distinctiveness of the various races of mankind. Giuseppe Sergi would go far in establishing techniques in the burgeoning sub-discipline of craniology based on morphological traits of the human skull, rather than on lines and angles. He would continue to make such innovations until his death.
Unlike many others of his day, Sergi was opposed to the use of the cephalic index in determining population ancestry. Rather, he felt that cranial morphology would be a more useful tool. Though he made a number of significant contributions to the burgeoning field of physical anthropology, two stand out.
The first was his theory on the origins of Southern Europeans.Previous generations of naturalists had been heavily influenced by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, a 19th century French aristocrat and novelist who attempted to explain the origins of modern races in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Though he lacked training as a theologian and naturalist, Gobineau presumptuously sought to grapple with topics that baffled even the leading erudite minds of his day.
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| Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau |
Gobineau was thoroughly convinced the Bible was a reliable storehouse of historical information about human origins. As such, his essay was written from that perspective. At the time of his existence the scientific and theological worlds were divided on the subject of human origins (as they pretty much are today). One school of thought in both worlds, called monogenism, held that all human races held a common origin. The other, polygenism, held that the major human races (white, black & yellow) had different origins.
Where Gobineau differed from many others of his time was his belief that while the major human races of the world shared a common origin, from the beginning the progeny of Adam and Eve were separated into (what he believed) were different species of mankind. The indigenous inhabitants of places like Southern and Eastern Europe were, he also believed, “mixed”. He also believed that (Northern) Germanics were the purest example of the White race. Gobineau’s writings would have a highly influential effect on later generations of racists, including the Nazis. For this reason, he is considered by many historians to be the “Founding Father” of Aryanism or Nordicism. His views on human origins, though dated and thoroughly debunked, still survive in one form or another.
Sergi’s first standout contribution was his model of human origin, expounded in his books Human Variation and The Mediterranean Race (1901). According to Sergi, the ancestors of modern Europeans originated from what today is called the Horn of Africa and were related to modern day Hamitic peoples. At an early date, they settled into Europe, eventually becoming modern Northern and Southern Europeans. This model of human origin directly contrasted that of Gobineau’s and was a forerunner of today’s “Out of Africa” model of human beginnings.
By Sergi’s time the social theory known as Nordicism was in vogue among many Northern Europeans (and peoples elsewhere of Northern European descent). Sergi’s racial theories were in direct opposition to Nordic theory. For example, in contrast to Nordicists who claimed the ancient Greeks and Romans (or at least their rulers) were of Germanic stock who founded those great civilizations, Sergi cogently argued the Greeks and Romans were in fact, Mediterranean peoples and the later Germanic invasions of Rome produced nothing but “delinquency, vagabondage and ferocity.”
In addition to ancient Greece and Rome, Sergi would go on to argue the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Carthage were likewise the products of native Mediterranean peoples, a claim also made by a number of British physical anthropologists including Elliot Smith and Geoffrey M. Morant.
Giuseppe Sergi’s most lasting contribution to the growing field of anthropology was his spirited defense of Darwinism. While acknowledging (at the time) the dearth of transitional life forms in the fossil record, he nonetheless held that Darwin’s core thesis – evolution by natural selection, was valid. This was at a time when support for Darwinism in many parts of Europe (especially Italy) was low.
For this and his efforts at systemizing the science, it would be only natural to confer upon him the unofficial title of the Father of Modern Physical Anthropology.
Further reading:• Sergi, Giuseppe: The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of European Peoples; Forgotten Books; 2012
• http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2011Vol89/e-pub/20841631.pdf
