Henry Harpending, co-author of foundational bioarchaeology and human-evolution papers, became a documented race-science figure

Henry C. Harpending (1944–2016), a University of Utah anthropologist and population geneticist, co-authored work the mainstream treats as infrastructure: the field-standard Osteological Paradox paper (1992) and the PNAS 2007 "accelerated human evolution" paper. He went on to co-author the popular book The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009) with Gregory Cochran, and an earlier paper proposing a genetic basis for Ashkenazi Jewish IQ (Cochran, Hardy & Harpending, Journal of Biosocial Science, 2006). By the 2010s he was documented as a figure in scientific racism.

Per the Southern Poverty Law Center's Extremist Files, Harpending participated in the 2009 "Preserving Western Civilization" conference, sharing a stage with immigration restrictionist Peter Brimelow and psychologist J. Philippe Rushton. SPLC attributes to his 2011 H.L. Mencken Club talk the statement that "group differences, as far as we know, are in the DNA," and reports that he used that same talk to promote eugenics — praising as "eugenics" what he described as medieval Europe's "brutal enforcement of laws," under which, in his telling, "we killed off the violent folks." Separately, in SPLC's general characterization of his views, the "old kind" of human — which he identifies with present-day hunter-gatherers — is "impulsive, violent, innumerate, illiterate, and lazy." The through-line of his later interpretive work is genetic determinism about group differences.

The note is careful about its own evidence. The characterization and quotes rest on SPLC, a Tier-3 advocacy organization; per the vault's sourcing floor a contested, load-bearing biographical claim of this kind should be corroborated at Tier 1–2 (primary recordings, conference programs, or Harpending's own texts). The verification is routed to question-verify-harpending-splc-race-science-quotes-primary, and the note stays seedling until then. What is well-grounded is the narrower framing: SPLC documents Harpending as such a figure, and the peer-reviewed publication record (Osteological Paradox, PNAS 2007) is independently verifiable.