Europeans sought pre-Adamite origins for Native Americans and Africans

Evidence

Some speculated that Native Americans had to have descended from “a different Adam.” By the end of the sixteenth century, European thinkers had added African people to the list of species descended from a different Adam. In 1616, Italian freethinker Lucilio Vanini said—as Locke suggested later—that Ethiopians and apes must have the same ancestry, distinct from Europeans. But no one made the case for polygenesis as stoutly as French theologian Isaac La Peyrère in Prae-Adamitae in 1655. Translated into English in 1656, Men Before Adam was publicly burned in Paris and banned from Europe (after Locke secured a copy). Christians tossed La Peyrère in prison and burned Vanini at the stake for defying the Christian monogenesis story of Adam and Eve. But they could not stop the drift of polygenesis. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 121

Categorization

• XREF: The polygenesis geneaology matters for the reader’s task: it is evidence that ideas about separate origins predated and supported racist policy — a candidate counterexample to test Kendi’s inversion (ideas before policy).
• QUESTION: Kendi casts polygenesis as a racist idea potentially preceding policy — but the reader wants to test ignorance→hate→discrimination reversal here. Do the Americas’ first racists rationalize already-existing enslavement, or do pre-Adamite ideas genuinely come first? Worth chasing.