Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay is one of first anthropologists…

Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay is one of first anthropologists to refute polygenism and scientific racism, the view that the different races of mankind belong to different species and that some human races are inferior, on the basis of his comparative anatomical research.

Miklouho-Maclay’s humanist views lead him to actively campaign against the slave trade and blackbirding carried on between the islands of Melanesia and plantations in Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia.

In November 1878, the Dutch government informs him that on his recommendations it is checking the slave traffic at Ternate and Tidore.

Miklouho-Maclay was born in a temporary workers camp in Novgorod Governorate (currently Okulovsky District of Novgorod Oblast) in Russia, a son of a civil engineer working on the construction of the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Railway.

His Ukrainian father was descended from Stepan Myklukha, a Zaporozhian Cossack, who was awarded the title of noble of the Empire by Catherine II for his military exploits during the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792), which included the capture of the Ochakov fortress.His mother, Ekaterina Semenovna, née Bekker, was of German and Polish descent (her three brothers had taken part in the January Uprising of 1863).

After 1873, the Miklouho-Maclay family owned a country estate in Malyn, one hundred and fifty kilometers (ninety-three miles) northwest of Kiev.

Nicholas had attended a German Lutheran school, a course at the Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, but only spent two months at St. Petersburg University, due to being expelled and debarred from tertiary education in Imperial Russia for "breaking the rules".

He thus had had to complete his studies in German universities; this had provided an opportunity to study and to work with leading European scientists.

He had studied humanities at Heidelberg, medicine at Leipzig, and zoology at the University of Jena, where he had come under the influence of the great German scholar Ernst Haeckel, who has a profound influence on his future.

Miklouho-Maclay's brilliant student records had attracted the attention of Haeckel, who made him his assistant as part of a field expedition to the Canary Islands in 1866.

There, Miklouho-Maclay had taken an interest in sharks and sponges and discovered a new sponge species, which he named Guancha blanca, in tribute to the Guanches, the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands who had been exterminated by European invaders.

He had also become a close friend of the biologist Anton Dohrn, with whom he had helped conceive the idea of research stations while staying with him at Messina, Italy.

Miklouho-Maclay had left St. Petersburg for Australia on the steam corvette Vityaz, arriving in Sydney on July 18, 1878.

A few days after arriving, he had approached the Linnean Society and offered to organize a zoological center.

In September 1878, his offer is approved.

In scientific and anthropological circles during the 1850s and 1860s, there had been much discussion connected with the study of human races and the interpretation of racial peculiarities.

Some anthropologists, like Samuel Morton, had tried to prove that not all human races are of equal worth, and that "white people" are predestined by "natural selection" to rule over the "colored" races.

This attitude had been used to justify slavery and colonialism.

Scientists like Ernst Haeckel, a teacher of Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay as a young anthropologist, relegate what they regard as culturally "backward" people like Papuans, Bushmen and others to the role of 'intermediate links' between Europeans and their animal ancestors.

While adhering to Darwin's theory of evolution, Miklouho-Maclay diverges from these racist concepts, and it is this question that leads Miklouho-Maclay to gather scientific facts and to study the dark-skinned inhabitants of New Guinea.