Know what you're getting into!

IN this book Fuerle remarks, in passing, that "Where you end up depends on where you started." Although honest science does its best to avoid such circularity, ideological tracts revel in it.

As a senior anthropologist who teaches and reads about human evolution on a daily basis, I found this book intriguing at first glance--but then it began to sink in that there was something odd about it. Hoping to find out more, I searched in vain for reviews in reputable journals or web sites, but I found it enthusiastically touted in Neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites, including some that raged about "ni--ers," and one with a poll to vote on whether Blacks should be defined as an inferior species! Hmmm. But not to prejudge it by association, I decided it was part of my professional responsibility to read the book and comment on as objectively as possible it in this review forum.

There are some understandable reasons why, putting aside its frankly racist arguments, some readers might be drawn to this book. Evolutionary anthropology is an inherently fascinating field and Fuerle, though lacking in scientific training or credentials, offers fairly accessible explanations of some of the basics one might encounter in an introductory anthropology course. He has searched far and wide in the literature for things that could be made to fit his hypothesis, and he has carefully selected, trimmed, remolded and arranged them into what might seem, to the uninitiated, like a persuasive and original argument.

Essentially, Fuerle's thesis is that (contrary to the prevailing "Out of Africa" scenario) the evolution from premodern humans to fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens occurred somewhere in Eurasia after our earliest ancestors left Africa, and that modern Africans (along with Australians and various others) represent an earlier stage of evolution, not to be confused with the more fully evolved people of Europe and Asia. Along the way, Fuerle develops the concept of "ethnies," a mashup of cultural and racial groupings, and claims that some ethnies are natural "predators" while others are "parasitic." When "host" ethnies become aware that they are being exploited by such shiftless, unproductive parasites, they will overthrow them and as a result will experience a "boom" in prosperity, as (he claims) Germany did when it freed itself from the grip of parasitic Jewry in the 1930's. African-Americans, he makes clear, are worthless, criminal parasites on American society.

While Fuerle often strives to adopt the tone of dispassionate science, the gloves come off in the final chapters, where he very frankly argues for racial separatism and eugenics, and suggests that the "anti-racism" of establishment scientists is a "form of mental illness." The notion that we should apply the same ethical standards in our treatment of the racial/cultural "other" as we do within our own group is denounced as a "corrupt" doctrine wielded by the ubiquitous "equality police."

Some readers might initially be impressed by Fuerle's extensive footnoting, but a closer look reveals serious problems in his use of sources. Since he dismisses virtually all contemporary anthropologists as misguided "Afrocentrists," Fuerle is obliged to cast his net very broadly. The rich and ever-changing body of relevant recent research is almost entirely ignored, and what little does appear is carefully selected and often misrepresented. If one follows the footnotes documenting some his most bizarre claims, the trail often goes cold. For example, the footnote to his assertion that Africans are genetically closer than Eureopeans to the apes leads only to a further reflection in which the author invites the reader to subjectively compare photographs of apes, Europeans, and Africans! The footnote documenting the claim that challenges to the computer modeling have invalidated the "African Eve" hypothesis seem to be missing in my Kindle edition of the book, but the challenge to which he evidently refers is one that was debated in the early 1990's and has long since been resolved.

The only living anthropologist whom Fuerle regularly cites in support of his ideas is Phillipe Rushton, who is--to put it as delicately as I can--outside the mainstream, and he has to go back another fifty years to find the next sympathetic anthropologist, Carleton S. Coon. Fuerle is particularly fond of "sources" on the mental and physical comparison of Europeans and Africans that go back a hundred years or more (some as early as the 1830's), and he is unashamed even to cite sources that would have been considered amateurish at the time, including European colonists' views of "natives" or an 1890's edition of the "People's Commonsense Medical Advisor."

Given Fuerle's adeptness in finding (and molding) scattered factoids to support his thesis, it's almost certain that he has come across some of the increasingly detailed evidence of physically and behaviorally modern humans in Africa long before they appeared in Europe or even Asia. None of this evidence, however, will turn up in this book.

For the reader who is strongly wedded to Fuerle's conclusions, none of this will matter. Those genuinely interested in the marvelous advance of objective knowledge about the human past should, however, look elsewhere.