Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that humans are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity. Modern scientific views find little merit in any polygenic model due to an increased understanding of speciation in a human context, with the monogenic "Out of Africa" hypothesis and its variants being the most widely accepted models without supporting evidence of later archaeological sites for human origins. Polygenism has historically been heavily used in service of white supremacist ideas and practices, disproving a common origin between European and non-European peoples by considering archaeological evidence found from modern day DNA sequences comparing hominid species and modern humans. It can be distinguished between Biblical polygenism, describing a Pre-Adamite or Co-Adamite origin of certain races in the context of the Genesis narrative of Adam and Eve, and scientific polygenism, attempting to find a taxonomic basis for ideas of racial science.
Origins Many oral traditions feature polygenesis in their creation stories. For example, Bambuti mythology and other creation stories from the pygmies of Congo state that the supreme God of the pygmies, Khonvoum, created three different races of humans separately out of three kinds of clay: one black, one white, and one red. In some cultures, polygenism in the creation narrative served an etiological function. These narratives provided an explanation as to why other people groups exist who are not affiliated with their tribe. Moreover, distinctions made between the creation of foreign people groups and the tribe or ethnic group to which the creation myth pertains served to reinforce tribal or ethnic unity, the need to exercise wariness and caution when dealing with outsiders, or the unique nature of the relationship between that tribe and the deities of their religious system. An example may be found in the creation myth of the Asmat people, a hunter-gatherer tribe situated along the south-western coast of New Guinea. This creation myth asserts that the Asmat themselves came into being when a deity placed carved wooden statues in a ceremonial house and began to beat a drum. The statues became living humans and began to dance. Some time later, a great crocodile attempted to attack this ceremonial house, but was defeated by the power of the deity. The crocodile was cut into several pieces and these were tossed in different directions. Each piece became one of the foreign tribes known to the Asmat. The idea is also found in some ancient Greek and Roman literature. For example, the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women. In his Against the Galileans Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germani and the Scythians (northern nations) were different in their bodies (i.e. complexion and other traits) to the Ethiopians. He therefore could not imagine such difference in physical attributes as having originated from common ancestry, and so maintained separate creations for different races. In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants of the antipodes (Antichthones). These inhabitants were considered by some to have separate origins because of their geographical extremity. The religion of the Ainu people claims that the ancestors of the Ainu people arrived on Earth from the skies separate from the other races. See Ainu creation myth.
Main beliefs In their respective fundamentalist or Orthodox sects, Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims have embraced monogenism in the form that all modern humans ultimately are descended from a single mating pair, named Adam and Eve. In this context, polygenism described all alternative explanations for the origin of humankind that involved more than two individual "first people". This definition of polygenism is still employed among some Creationists and within the Roman Catholic Church (see Humani generis). With the development of the evolutionary paradigm of human origins, it has become widely held within the scientific community that at no point did there exist a single "first man" and a single "first woman" who constituted the first true humans to whom all lineages of modern humans ultimately converge and that if Adam and Eve ever existed as distinct historical persons, they were members of a much larger population of the same species. However, a common scientific explanation of human origins asserts that the population directly ancestral to all modern humans remained united as a single population by constant gene flow. Therefore, on the level of the entire human population, this explanation of human origin is classified as monogenism. All modern humans share the same origin from this single ancestral population. Modern polygenists do not accept either theological or scientific monogenism. They believe that the variation among human racial types cannot be accounted for by monogenism or by evolutionary processes occurring since the proposed recent African origin of modern humans. Polygenists reject the argument that human races must belong to a single species because they can interbreed. There are several polygenist hypotheses, including biblical creationist polygenism and polygenist evolution.
The Bible To make polygenism compatible with the Biblical account in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, some argument is needed to the effect that what is in the Bible is incomplete. Three standard positions are:
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