ABSTRACT
Throughout the Middle Ages, European scientific conceptions of human origins, expressed in the tradition of tripartite mappaemundi (maps of the world)—conventionally known as T in O maps-assumed the literal truth of the biblical narrative that the varieties of the human race were descended proximately from three sons of Noah and, ultimately, from Adam and Eve. To be sure, classical writers like Anaximander (c. 610-546 B.C.) had promulgated what look like protoevolutionary accounts of the human race. And Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-c. 395) had argued the case for Adam’s physical body being derived from animal forebears. Because he believed that everything existed in spermatic potential from the initial divine impulse of Creation, Gregory could and did advance a developmentalist account of the origin of life-forms and urged that the human body had been created through the inherent activity of the elements of the earth. But, in large measure, such speculations received little support in the Christian West, though later Christian evolutionists would look back to figures like Gregory to legitimate their own doctrinal orthodoxy. For all that, cartographic representations routinely associated the three known continents-Asia, Africa, and Europe —with the three sons of Noah-Sem (Shem), Cham (Ham), and Jafeth-thereby integrating a threefold continental schema with a tripartite racial taxonomy.
