Antoine Leveque
The current definition of the term “species” only started to emerge in Europe during the historical period that Western scholars call the Enlightenment. Before 1750, Christian theology asserted that God had created all species in an immutable fashion.[1] In pre-modern times, European learned discourses were dominated by the political perspectives of the Christian Church.[2] Species were therefore conceived as “essences” but, after World War II, when the genus homo started to be established from the standpoint of comparative anatomy in a non-racialist paradigm,[3] the term species then started to be simply understood as biological: a succession of individuals.[4] Before the Enlightenment, Western European scholars did not consider individual bodily differences as something important to their theological science. This is not to say that ancient Greco-Roman science or pre-Enlightenment science considered the body as unimportant. However, the body of non-Western Europeans was often imagined rather than studied anthropologically.
Figure 1. An image traditionally found in medieval books. This depiction of diversity is borrowed from the natural history of an authoritative Roman author named Gaius Plinius Secundus (CE 23–79), known as Pliny the Elder.’ This is a phantasmagorical rendering of far-away people before Western Europeans mastered oceangoing ships and gunpowder technology. (Image in the public domain.)
For instance, language and religious faith were more important to Western European scholars than traits such as skin color or hair type. The most important point is that Western European theologians considered the members of our species as beings possessed of an immortal soul. Following ancient theories such as that of Aristotle, they deemed this soul to be naturally rational. However, a conversion to Christianity though the religious rite of baptism was indispensable in order for people to be considered human beings.[5]
As the Christian Church became an epistemic and political institution from the 5th century CE onward, a specific doctrine about mankind crystallized in European learned discourses and scholarly circles. The Church’s theorists argued that the label homo (the Latin for “man”), which was used in pre-Christian science, was to be applied to any living form endowed with the ability to reason and the ability to speak.[6] If one could utter words, learn a language, and speak in an intelligible manner, Western European science considered that person possessed the character that was considered as the distinctive sign of species membership. However, before the introduction of transcontinental navigation technology, people living overseas and far away from Europe did not speak the same languages as the Europeans, who came to exploit natural resources, trade, colonize, and convert locals to Christianity.
The aggressive behavior of European merchants made cultural exchanges and good diplomatic relationships between people diffi