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Friedrich Tiedemann (1781-1891) was a German physiologist who believed that there were no fundamental differences in intellectual or moral worth between “races” and the sexes. Tiedemann’s ground breaking work, “On the Brain of the Negro, compared with European and the Orang-Outang (1836),” disproved popular notions about African intellectual inferiority.
Tiedemann compared Europeans, orangutans, and Africans and found no difference between African and European brain or nerve structures. After adjusting for body differences, Tiedemann found that African and European brains weren’t different at all. Based on the idea that intelligence was directly related to brain size, Tiedemann concluded that African intelligence was equal to that of Europeans. He even took his conclusion a step further to state that women’s brains, when adjusted for women’s smaller stature, might be larger than men’s brains.
Tiedemann’s research and conclusions set him apart from almost all other European and North American scientists studying human differences. His work stood in stark contrast to the more well known studies by the American anthropologist, Samuel Morton. Morton argued that skull sizes from the different races proved the intellectual superiority of white European and Americans over darker skinned peoples. Tiedemann’s work had more scientific merit, and his ideas laid the groundwork for researchers in the 20th century who further undermined the foundations for scientific racism.
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