ABSTRACT
Following the great geographical discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spanish, from the middle of the fifteenth century, Europeans first came into direct contact with non-European human groups that were neither white nor Christian. The first encounters were along the western and southern coasts of Africa, and subsequent ones in America. The Europeans arrived with the entire system of anthropological associations developed since ancient times, and grafted them onto the non-European, non-white and non-Christian people, of dubious humanity in their eyes, whom they met. And as they tried to identify places in Africa or America as the lost Eden, the lost Atlantis or the kingdom of Prester John, in which lay the land of the Ten Lost Tribes, so they grafted the black image, developing in Europe since Hellenistic times, onto the darkskinned human groups they met.
