Tragic tales of Evolutionary Exploitation

Julia Pastrana: The Ape Woman

As mentioned in part 1 of this series, examples of so-called links between humans and their supposed animal heritage appeared prior to Darwin’s primary publications. The cruel and racist attitudes such ideas produced took a fearful toll on some of the unfortunate people involved in the human Freak Show industry.

For example, five years prior to Darwin’s Origin of Species, Julia Pastrana was exhibited on Broadway in New York’s Gothic Hall. She was originally billed as a “Marvelous Hybrid or Bear Woman” and noted as a “semi-human being,” “somewhat between a human being and an ourang-outang” by George C. D. Odell (the theater chronicler) in his diary. She was described as follows:

The eyes of this lusus natura [Latin, literally “a sport of nature,” a freak, mutant, or monster] beam with intelligence, while its jaws, jagged fangs and ears are terrifically hideous. . . . Nearly its whole frame is coated with long glossy hair. Its voice is harmonious, for this semi-human being is perfectly docile.1

Pastrana was of Mexican-Indian descent and born hirsute, with her entire body covered in thick black hair. Her jaws and teeth were also unusually prominent, likely due to what would now be described as severe gingival hyperplasia.

Over the course of her career, she would be described as “Baboon Lady,” “Ape Woman,” and “The Ugliest Woman in the World” in advertisements and commentaries made for her performances, in which she sang and danced for the masses. Today she would be described medically as suffering from polytrichosis.

During this time, approximately 50 other people were known to have Pastrana’s condition, and many of them worked in circuses as ape-men or human werewolves2 and thus influenced hundreds of thousands of average people toward a belief in a supposed animalistic origin for not only her but the history of humankind.

Interestingly, Scripture describes an example of someone who seemed to have an abnormal amount of hair as well: Jacob’s twin brother Esau:

But Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, “Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.” (Genesis 27:11)

Thus for Jacob and his mother, Rebecca, to fool the blind Isaac, Jacob disguised himself as Esau with hairy goat skins. When Isaac felt the hair on Jacob’s arms, he believed that Jacob was Esau.

While Esau may have simply been at the extreme end of what is considered normal male hairiness, such a specific deception may indicate a Scriptural example of someone suffering some type of abnormality such as male hirsutism or hypertrichosis.

The number of references demonstrating the attempt to position Pastrana as a missing link or ape-like throwback is quite prolific, and high-level evolutionist scientists of the day used her condition to promote evolutionary belief. Here are just a few examples:

• Ernst Haeckel (infamous for his forged embryo drawings used to falsely promote evolution in textbooks for over 100 years) described Pastrana as an ape-like human that represented “a higher stage of development” than “the long-nosed apes” in his book The Evolution of Man.3
• Charles Darwin described Pastrana as gorilla-like evidence of the assortment of genetic variation found in humans that natural selection could select from.4
• The overtly racist The Living Races of Mankind5 (which was considered a standard anthropological text in 1902) contained a photograph of Pastrana used in certain American racist publications, claiming her an example of a hybrid “between a black person and an ape.”6
• And anthropologist Richard Milner (author of The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity’s Search for Its Origins) stated, “Julia Pastrana was a ‘throwback’ to an ape-like stage of humanity.”7

Abused in Life and Death

Pastrana’s story of exploitation is indeed a sad one that seemed to have no boundaries. Her husband and manager, Theodore Lent, arranged for performances both during her life and after her and their infant son’s death (both suffered from similar diseases). He arranged their embalming to allow their bodies to be exhibited and entice audiences whenever he could find venues that would allow it.

Incredibly, the general public’s appetite for such grotesque displays was not limited just to the Victorians and early 20th century parishioners but astonishingly continued into the early 1970s.

As late as 1972, Pastrana’s body toured the United States with a travelling amusement park called the Million Dollar Midways. The following summer, the bodies of mother and child were displayed across Sweden. . . . Thereafter, the bodies were stored.8

In fact, it wasn’t until February 7, 2013, that Julia Pastrana was returned to Mexico and buried with proper dignity a few days later in Sinaloa de Leyva. If Pastrana had been perceived as fully human (created in the image of God and simply a victim of a sin-cursed world), she and her son’s remains would never have been allowed to be displayed for profit like animals.

Krao the Monkey Woman: Darwin’s Missing Link

Once his seminal work was published, popularized, and iconized within the more atheistic and anti-biblical intellects of his day, Darwin’s name became associated with popular evolutionary ideas such as missing links with increasing regularity.

A well-known example is Krao Farini, a young Siamese girl who was exploited as an “ape child” when she was six years old, first in Europe and later in the US. Krao apparently suffered from medical challenges similar to Julia Pastrana’s. The physical results of her medical conditions provided her promoters with everything they were looking for in an ape-man/hybrid exhibit.

Having appeared on the scene in the early 1880s (nine years after The Descent of Man’s main ideas had been absorbed, assimilated, and disseminated into the consciousness of Western society), Krao was literally referred to as “Darwin’s missing link” in a self-described “exhaustive research of medical literature” titled Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, published in 1896.9

This was despite the vast awareness and understanding of such medical conditions. There was no reason, except to benefit self-serving promoters (for both monetary and ideological gains), to justify Krao’s exploitation. In fact, Miss Farini was well-read and spoke several languages, yet she starred in the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, until she passed away at age 49 in April 1926.

As evolutionary ideas continued to grow among the scientific and lay communities, missing link exhibits in side-shows became more and more commonplace. Naturalistic ideas of man’s origins were disseminated first among the scientific elite and then among the general public through such exhibits. Once popularized, they were then used by scientists as observable examples of human evolution. This created an ideological cycle of cross-promotion that bolstered belief in more naturalistic ideas of man’s origins among all strata of society—in clear contradiction of the plain reading of God’s Word.

Next week: Part 3, Fueling the Fire of “Scientific” Racism