Morton was a polygenist, meaning he rejected the biblical story of a single pair of ancestors for all of humanity. This is a striking way in which Morton's scientific theories were more distorted than the race scientists who came before him. Janet Monge: If you insist on talking about ancient Egyptians in racial or ethnic terms, they were like today's Egyptians. They're actually situated very nicely as North Africans and very specifically as having components basically of two continental masses pretty much.