cestry. This theory is particularly convenient to Judeo-Christian mythology, and thus the original ancestry was Adam and Eve. This argument would contend that racial differences are caused by conditions in the environment. However, theories of monogeny also, in the tradition of white supremacy, contended "that whites were the pure and original race from which others had degenerated,"(Somerville, 22). These ideas were relatively prevalent until the mid-1800's.
Conversely, polygenyùa "predominantly American theoretical development," held that "different races were actually different species with distinct biological and geographic origins," (22). This theory was not widely practiced until the mid-1800's, when it was primarily used to influence decisions about the enslavement of Africans in America.
Somerville explains that though they were of differing viewpoints, "adherents to both polygeny and monogeny nevertheless shared many epistemological assumptions...that the body was a legible text, with various keys or languages available for reading its symbolic codes," (23). This is just not the case, as we later discovered.
Even after the emergence of Darwin and his theories on evolution that so apparently disproved the notions
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