Concepts of race in the Historicography of northeast Africa
Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.
Funj origins: A critique and new evidence
The Funj Sultanate was the most easterly of the chain of Muslim dynastic States which at one time stretched south of the Sahara through Bilād al-Sūdān. Founded early in the sixteenth Christian century (tenth Hijri¯; century) by a king traditionally called ‘Amāra Dūnqas, its centre was on the Blue Nile, around the town of Sennar (Sinnār).
Inapplicability of the Subspecies Concept to North American Marten
ORTHODOX systematic treatment of North American martens (Martes americana) led me to conclude that partitioning of the species into subspecies was completely arbitrary, because most variation was clinial, and because at least some characters varied discordantly. An attempt was made to test this conclusion by mapping characters singly as two-dimensional clines, and in combination as averages of slopes of clines in the manner suggested by Womble (1951). This paper is devoted to an account of the testing and its results. American marten all belong to a single species, M. americana (Wright, 1953), which is closely related to, and may be conspecific with, M. zibellina and M. martes of Eurasia (Hagmeier, 1955). Wright (op. cit.) has concluded that M. americana is made up of two morphological "sections," americana and caurina, which intergrade where their ranges meet in Idaho and Montana. The work reported here is concerned only with variation in the americana section of Martes americana. This section is currently described as comprising seven subspecies, whose ranges and type localities are mapped as Figure 1.