Almond's article is about the way in which geographical exploration and conquest led some 17th-century European intellectuals to speculate about how the peoples of the 'new world' fit into existing beliefs about humanity (e.g., how they'd arrived on distant continents without large ships, why they looked and acted differently to Europeans, etc). In particular, it focuses on the arguments that maybe indigenous Americans were descended from someone other than Adam (which potentially explained where Cain's wife came from, but raised a whole host of other questions about whether this meant Native Americans were subject to Original Sin, whether they were included in Christ's Atonement, even whether they were fully 'human').
Around the same kind of time, the development of heliocentric astronomy (and thus, the conclusion that the Earth wasn't necessarily all that special astronomically speaking) led some people to start speculating about life on other planets (and thus about the theological status of aliens).
Some random emic quotes I liked:
"All the Australians are of both Sexes, or Hermaphrodites, and if it happens that a child is born but of one, they strangle him as a Monster."-Gabriel de Foigny, 1693, A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, quoted p.163. According to a quote from one of de Foigny's imaginary informants, this also meant that they lived "without being sensible of any of these Animal Ardours one for another, and we cannot bear them spoke of without horrour: Our Love has nothing Carnall, nor Brutall in it." Instead, children grew inside them like fruit.
“the different Soyls, or various Modifications of Matter in several parts of the World, [produce] Men of different Colours and Complexions.”-Thomas Robinson, 1694, The Anatomy of the Earth, quoted p.170
An interesting theory of Lamarckian runaway selection in Ethiopians:
"in a Generation or two, that high degree of Tawniness became the nature, and from thence the Pride of the Inhabitants; the men began to value themselves chiefly upon this complexion, and the Women to affect them the better for it; from thence by the love to the Male so complexioned, the daily conversation with him and the affectation of his hew, there was caused a considerable Influence upon the Foetus’s which the females were pregnant with; so that, upon this account, the Children in Aethiopia became more and more black, according to the fancy of the Mother."
-William Nicholls, 1696, A Conference With a Theist (quoted p.170)
"Now can any one look upon, and compare these Systems together, without being amazed at the vast Magnitude and noble attendance of these two Planets, in respect of this pitiful little Earth of ours? Or can they force themselves to think, that the wise Creator has so disposed of all his Plants and Animals here, has furnish’d and adorn’d this Spot only, and has left all those Worlds bare and destitute of Inhabitants, who might adore and worship him; or that those prodigious Bodies were made only to twinkle to, and be studied by some few perhaps of us poor fellows?"
-Christian Huygens, 1698, The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, quoted p.171
"God therefore may have joined immaterial souls, even of the same class and capacities in their separate state, to other kind of bodies, and in other laws of union; and from those different laws of union there will arise quite different affections, and natures, and species of the compound beings. So that we ought not upon any account to conclude, that if there be rational inhabitants in the moon or Mars, or any unknown planets of other systems, they must therefore have human nature, or be involved in the circumstances of our world."
-Richard Bentley, quoted p.173
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