The Races of Mankind - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

This present book, by Professor M. F. Nesturkh, is based on the methodological principles of Soviet anthropology and the factual data obtained by that science. The author connects the origin of the races with the origin of mankind as a whole and acquaints the reader with the present status of these two problems; he deals at length with the history of the formation, dissemination and mingling of individual anthropological (racial) types and their groups, uses facts to expose the reactionary nature of racism and proves that it has no foundation in science.

Professor Nesturkh naturally devotes greater attention to anthropology proper, but he makes extensive use of other natural and social sciences-comparative anatomy, physiology, palaeontology, archaeology, ethnography, psychology, and linguisticsin accordance with Frederick Engels's well-known postulate that anthropology is the transition from the morphology and physiology of man and his races to history.

It must not be thought that Professor Nesturkh's book is limited to an exposure of racism. The problems dealt with are of a much broader cognitive significance. Among other things the reader will find the latest information on the anthropoids of the Tertiary period (the distant ancestors of man and the modern anthropoid apes), the earliest hominids (Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus), Neanderthal man and the fossil men of the modern type. The author also deals with the natural selection of the earliest men, geographical isolation, inter-racial crossing, the times and places in which the great races were formed, the ways in which they became disseminated and the relation of tribes, nationalities and nations to the races. He takes the reader on a journey through the animal kingdom to the world of man and introduces him to the beginnings of human history, in the course of which the laws of evolution that apply to the organic world have been replaced by the qualitatively new laws of social development.

In the final chapter Professor Nesturkh, in addition to his exposureof racism, touches on such important scientific problems as "Race and Language", "Race and Mentality". He adduces convincing evidence of the absence of any causal relation between the racial groups and language groups of mankind; he also shows that all modern races and nations are identical in their mental abilities. Stress is properly laid on the tremendous successes of communist construction in the U.S.S.R. and socialist construction of the People's Democracies of Europe and Asia. The experience of these countries has completely destroyed the reactionary myth that mankind is divided into "higher" and "lower" races and shown that all peoples, irrespective of their racial make-up, are capable of developing genuinely progressive culture and science. The unscientific concept of racism is also refuted by the economic, political and cultural development of the young states in Asia, Africa and Latin America, recently liberated from the yoke of colonialism.

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