Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), namer of the pterodactyl, dissector of Sarah Baartman, was one of France’s top scientists in the early 1800s. He founded comparative anatomy and palaeontology as we know them. He was called “the dictator of biology” in the days before Darwin.
Comparative anatomy is that thing where scientists can take a few bones and recreate a long-dead creature. It comes from Cuvier. By 1799 he had discovered how to do it. It soon became clear that the distant past was a very different place, with pterodactyls flying through the air.
Catastrophism: Cuvier said that the earth has been visited with four catastrophes that wiped out most life, Noah’s Flood being the latest. After each catastrophe, God creates new species of plants and animals. Since the Earth was less than 6,000 years old according to the Bible, there was not enough time for evolution to account for the great changes seen in the fossil record. After all, the mummified cats of Ancient Egypt were more than halfway back to the beginning of time and they were just like the cats of the 1800s. Charles Lyell would later overturn catastrophism, laying the groundwork for Darwin.
Racism: Ancient Egyptians had to be Caucasian because their brains were too big to be Negroes:
“we possess so many of the ancient Egyptian embalmed bodies, it is easy to prove that, whatever may have been the hue of their skin, they belonged to the same race with ourselves; that their cranium and brain were equally voluminous; in a word, that they formed no exception to that cruel law, which seems to have doomed to eternal inferiority all the tribes of our species which are unfortunate enough to have depressed and compressed cranium.”
Notice that Negro inferiority is assumed as a given.
Sarah Baartman: She was an African woman with a huge butt who was shown in England and France in a cage like she was an animal. When she died in 1815, just five years after arriving in Europe, Cuvier studied her body, particularly her genitals and her butt – in the name of science. He made a plaster mould of her body, put her brain, vulva and anus in glass jars, and stripped the flesh from her skeleton and hung it in a Paris museum.
Cuvier reports:
“She had a way of pouting her lips exactly like what we have observed in the orang-utan. Her movements had something abrupt and fantastical about them, reminding one of those of the ape. Her lips were monstrously large. Her ear was like that of many apes, being small, the tragus weak, and the external border almost obliterated behind. These are animal characters. I have never seen a human head more like an ape than that of this woman.”
Yet she knew three languages and was learning a fourth. Cuvier himself admitted she had an excellent memory. And he knew full well that apes do not have thick lips.
Thus one of the great minds of Western science.
– Abagond, 2018.
Sources: mainly Google Images; “Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Man Demonstrated by the Investigations of Champollion, Wilkinson, Rosellini, Van-Amringe, Gliddon, Young, Morton, Knox, Lawrence, Gen. J. H. Hammond, Murray, Smith, W. Gilmore Simms, English, Conrad, Elder, Prichard, Blumenbach, Cuvier, Brown, Le Vaillant, Carlyle, Cardinal Wiseman, Burckhardt, and Jefferson” (1851) by John Campbell; “The Flamingo’s Smile” (1985) by Stephen Jay Gould; “The Mismeasure of Man (1996) by Stephen Jay Gould; “Medical Apartheid” (2006) by Harriet A. Washington.
See also:
- Sarah Baartman
- lips
- Charles Lyell
- Charles Darwin
- US racism: the 1800s
- Why White people demonize Black people
- Black people as monkeys
- Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Tarnished Name
- “The average African IQ is 70” – same shit, different century
- Thoreau’s library – he had Cuvier’s “Animal Kingdom”
630
Another cunning stunt!
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“Notice that Negro inferiority is assumed as a given.”
And still is.
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“we possess so many of the ancient Egyptian embalmed bodies, it is easy to prove that, whatever may have been the hue of their skin, they belonged to the same race with ourselves; that their cranium and brain were equally voluminous; in a word, that they formed no exception to that cruel law, which seems to have doomed to eternal inferiority all the tribes of our species which are unfortunate enough to have depressed and compressed cranium.”
Wow, this is deep. When are you going to do a post on Dr. Mostafa Hefny’s ‘whiteness’?
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Ironically, apes also don’t have big genitals. Having large pendulous vulvas/ penises seems to be scattered pretty randomly throughout the animal kingdom, at least the mammals. The average gorilla’s dick is between 1/3 & 1/4 of the size of a human’s. And just like with lips you can justifiably say that smaller genitals = closer to apes.
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where did that 6000 yrs come from a lot of born agains were all about that back i the 80s
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@ 1tawnystranger
That is an interesting observation.
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So the early 1800s was the time “scientific” racism overtook “religious” racism to justify White supremacy and Black degradation. Hmm.
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Cuvier a study in science racism.
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The average gorilla’s dick is between 1/3 & 1/4 of the size of a human’s. And just like with lips you can justifiably say that smaller genitals = closer to apes.
This is precisely why I’ve never engaged in beastiality! Seriously, I find these clowns’ obsession with male genitalia bizarre. Funny how they manage to get around to it.
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“we possess so many of the ancient Egyptian embalmed bodies, it is easy to prove that, whatever may have been the hue of their skin, they belonged to the same race with ourselves.” – Cuvier
Double entendre much! Truthfully, I tell you, that white gaze seems to be one hell of a drug; more like being on an enhanced form of crack!
Within the first part of Cuvier’s statement above, the word “Whatever” is utilized as an unrestricted pronoun. In other words, the Egyptians could’ve been any race or skin tone. But yet, in the latter part of this same statement, he specifically suggests that his race, “they”, as Caucasians, “belonged to the same race as ourselves.” WHAT?
“He (Cuvier) made a plaster mould of her body, put her brain, vulva and anus in glass jars, and stripped the flesh from her skeleton and hung it in a Paris museum.”
Only an individual inimitably possessed by the devil would perform such an inhumane act! (smh)
Most of you white folks need to put that crack pipe down!
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The desecration of Sarah Baartman’s corpse helps me to understand the reprehensible nature of these race scientist like Cuvier were and how abominable these animals were they (white supremacist) were and still continue to be the real beast.
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Most of you white folks need to put that crack pipe down!
I beg to differ, they need to put the syringe down. Otherwise LOL!!!!
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Shameful.
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Something tells me that if Cuvier had access to modern technology, he would have made a “Real Doll” out of Sarah Baartman’s corpse and kept it in his quarters for “personal study.”
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