This book is the second in a projected trilogy of studies on the biological history of the black in the Americas. In its predecessor, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, coauthored with Virginia Himmelsteib King, the reader will find a preface containing an apologia of sorts for attempting to unite the research of the biological and social sciences on the one hand, and to bring the findings to bear on black history on the other. Given the historical record of mistreatment of blacks by scientific and pseudoscientific racists, an initial statement of this nature was rightly de rigueur. A second would be redundant, and quite possibly presumptuous, for the reception of Another Dimension has made clear the existence of a methodologically sophisticated audience of scholars that needs no lecturing from me on either the obscurantism of old nature-nurture arguments or the value of cross-disciplinary research.

If, however, no one spied evil intent in Another Dimension, a few were disquieted by the speculative or conjectural nature of some of its arguments, and because portions of the book that follow are similarly vulnerable to such criticism, I feel compelled at this point to say a few words in defense of conjecture.

Broadly defined, the term means to infer from insufficient evidence. Thus, historians in particular, but social scientists as well, who are invariably faced with insufficient evidence are by definition conjecturers every time they assign meaning to a phenomenon or link two or more phenomena into an inferential chain of reasoning.