Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI ( Seligmann; 24 December 1873 – 19 September 1940) was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was highly influential as the teacher of such notable anthropologists as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes all of whose work overshadowed his own. Seligman's work promoted scientific racism and he was a proponent of the Hamitic hypothesis, according to which, some civilizations of Africa were thought to have been founded by Caucasoid Hamitic peoples. Since the 1960s the Hamitic hypothesis, along with other theories of "race science", has become entirely discredited in science. Life Seligman was born into a middle class Jewish family in London, the son of wine merchant Hermann Seligmann. (Charles shortened his name to Seligman after 1914.) He studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital. After several years as a physician and pathologist, he volunteered his services to the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait. He later joined expeditions to New Guinea (1904), Ceylon (1906–1908), and Sudan (1909–1912, again in 1921–1922). In 1905, Seligman married Brenda Zara Salaman, who he accompanied on their many expeditions and whom he credited in his publications. She was educated at Bedford College and was skilled at languages and she was able to observe ceremonies that Charles was not allowed to see. From 1913 to 1934, he served as chair of Ethnology at the London School of Economics, where the Anthropology department maintains the Seligman Library in his name. From 1933 he edited the Cresset Historical Series, a book series published by the Cresset Press in London. Seligman was also a Fellow of the Royal Society. Works Hamites Seligman is most remembered for his detailed ethnographical work Races of Africa (1930), which recognises four major distinct races of the African continent: Bushmanoids (Bushmen), Pygmies, Negroids, and Caucasoids (Hamites). The Hottentots, Seligman maintains are a mixture of Bushmanoid, Negroid and Hamitic. As a staunch proponent of the Hamitic theory, in his work Seligman asserts that Hamitic Caucasoid North and Northeast Africans were responsible for introducing non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages (Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian) into Africa, as well as civilization, technology and all significant cultural developments. In his book, Seligman states his belief that: "Apart from relatively late Semitic influence...the civilizations of Africa