and in the large islands to the east as far as the Philippines. This
Negroid type extends also eastward through Melanesia. From this
discontinuous distribution it would appear that the Negroes and
Negritos were the original population of southern Eurasia. It is
probable that from this region the true Negroes migrated westward into
Ethiopia.
At a date far earlier than this hypothetical migration westward,
an earlier type of Negroid pushed southeast to Tasmania, which was
thereafter cut off from the land mass of Australia. In Australia itself
these Tasmanians were absorbed or exterminated by the later coming
Australoids from whom they differed materially.
The racial tangle in Australia, Papua, and the islands of Melanesia
presents great difficulties in classification, but the basic element
appears to be Negro with a large admixture of later Mongoloids coming
from Asia.
The next zone of human population, superimposed in many cases upon the
Negroids, but south of the great central mountain ranges of Eurasia,
is constituted by the Mediterranean race. This race is characterized
by black, wavy hair, very dark eyes, oval face with fairly regular
features, dark olive skin, relatively short stature, and a somewhat
slight skeletal and muscular structure. This last character is in sharp
contrast with the powerful and sturdy build of the next two races to be
considered, the Alpine and the Nordic. The principal character of the
Mediterranean race, however, is its long (dolichocephalic) skull. The
Negroes, as we have said, have long skulls, but of quite a different
type.
The range of the Mediterraneans extends from the western part of the
British Isles, through Spain and along both coasts of the Mediterranean
Sea, down the east coast of Africa to Somaliland. In Asia it embraces
the Arabs, South Persians, most of the Hindus, with an eastward
extension. In Northeast Africa and India it is strongly mixed with
Negro.
Spreading everywhere throughout Europe north of the territory dominated
by the Mediterranean race, and often mixed with it, we find the
Alpines. This race is characterized by a somewhat short, stocky build
much sturdier than the Mediterranean, abundant dark, but not straight,
head and body hair, dark eyes and round (brachycephalic) skull.
The center of origin of the Alpines was somewhere in Central Asia
west of the true Mongols, north of the Mediterraneans, and east of
the Nordics--possibly in Turkestan. The Alpines and Mongols are both
characterized by a round skull but, as in the case of the long-skulled
Mediterraneans and the long-skulled Negroes, the type of skull differs
appreciably.
The Mongols and Alpines have been in close contact for ages. The
Mongols have issued again and again from East and Central Asia and
submerged the Alpines, driving them westward into Central Europe. There
has been a great deal of intermixture and the Slavic Alpine population
of eastern Europe frequently shows distinctive Mongol traits. However,
the two races, while perhaps remotely connected, differ widely. The
Alpines, like the Australoids and to a less extent like the Nordics,
have abundant body hair and copious beard, while the Mongols (like
their derivatives, the American Indians) are beardless and without body
hair. Alpine hair is wavy, that of the Mongols and Mongoloids straight.
Alpine features are rather coarse, often with a large prominent nose,
while true Mongols have an exceedingly flat face, depressed nose, and
a broad space between the eyes. This depressed nose, in adult Mongols,
is the retention of an infantile character, as babies of all races are
born with bridgeless noses. As to stature, most Alpines are of moderate
height, although those from the Tyrol to Albania, the so-called Dinaric
race, are decidedly tall.
It was a branch of tall Mongols, with a slight admixture of Alpines,
that crossed into America from Asia and became the ancestors of the
American Indians, who are of substantial height, often with prominent,
almost hawklike noses and high cheek bones.
We might mention here the Malays, who are essentially Mongols and
who pushed down into Indo-China and throughout the Malay Peninsula.
There are many traces of their blood in Polynesia. This expansion
was relatively recent and in those localities there are everywhere
indications of earlier races, especially of the very ancient Negroid
types known as Negritos. These Malays extended through the Philippines
as far north as Japan, where they met and mingled with a stream of
northern Mongoloid immigrants from Korea.
The Alpine domain at the present time extends from the center of France
eastward in an ever widening wedge as far as the Himalayas. It includes
the bulk of the population of Central France, North Italy, South
Germany, Switzerland, the provinces of the recent Austrian Empire,
and extends through the Balkan states, Russia, Asia Minor, and far
into Asia. This race penetrated into and overran Central Europe during
relatively recent times, probably at about the beginning of the Bronze
Age, approximately 1800 B.C.
East and north of the Carpathians, about 400 A.D., the Alpines had a
period of great expansion, chiefly at the expense of the Nordic race,
whose distribution we shall discuss presently.
As the Nordic tribes moved into the Roman provinces, the lands they
vacated were occupied by Alpine Slavs. All these movements may have
been caused by the pressure from the east of Asiatic Mongols, who, like
the Huns, were beginning their drive toward Europe. Our word slave
coming from Slav reveals the social relation of these Alpines to West
Europeans.
The westernmost of the Alpine Slavs were called Wends. In Charlemagne's
time they occupied what is now Germany as far west as the Elbe. In
its easternmost range these Alpines were called Turanians and were
confused with the Mongols of Central Asia, who had again and again
conquered them. The remnant of Wends in East Germany, the Bohemians,
most Poles and South Slavs are all Alpines. The great mass of Russians
are of this type, as well as the ancient Avars, Hunagars, Magyars,
Cumans, and the Bulgars, all more or less mixed with Mongols. The
Armenians are Alpines of an especially pronounced type and are probably
descended from the ancient Hittites. The East European Alpines are
saturated everywhere with Mongol blood, dating for the most part from
their conquest by the Tatars during the thirteenth century.
The fact that Asia, north of the main mountain ranges, is pre-eminently
the home of round skulls is very significant and suggests remote
relationship between Alpine and Mongol.
The Alpine skull reaches a most extreme form among the Armenians, who
have a very high skull, greatly flattened behind and somewhat like a
sugar loaf in shape.
The division of the races of mankind based on long and round skulls is
extremely ancient. We find both types among the fossil and semi-fossil
skulls at the end of the Paleolithic.
The first definite appearance of round skulls mixed with long skulls is
found in the burials at Offnet in Bavaria in the Azilian period at the
very end of the Paleolithic, some twelve thousand years ago.
From that day to this in France, Bavaria, and elsewhere in western
Europe as well as in eastern Europe the round skulls have expanded
their range. This steady increase of round-skull Alpines everywhere in
Central Europe in recent centuries is one of the most ominous racial
facts that confront us.
The great French anthropologist, deLapouge, stated in a recent letter
to the author that in France the cranial index has risen two points a
century since the Middle Ages, so that France is no longer a Nordic
land. This transformation is due, in the opinion of some observers,
to a mixture of race in which round-headedness is dominant over
long-headedness. In the opinion of the writer, however, it is due to
the replacement of one race, the Nordic, by another, the Alpine. The
Nordics not only incur disproportionate loss in war, but are also
highly nomadic in habit, while the Alpines, on the other hand, stick
close to the land and breed persistently.
Of the European races, there remains to be considered the Nordics,
a people greatly specialized, who have developed a fair skin,
light-colored eyes, tall stature of sturdy build, and long, _i.e._,
dolichocephalic skulls, and definite mental traits. The slow but
long-continued physical development of the Nordics has culminated in
a powerful skeleton and musculature in sharp contrast to that of the
Mediterranean race, to which the Nordic is more closely related than
to any other. In fact, the mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in the
British Islands may possibly be one of the few advantageous racial
crossings.
As to the homeland of the original Nordic race, we have as yet only
guesswork on the part of the anthropologist. When we shall know more
about the condition of Central Eurasia during the glacial period and
immediately thereafter, we may get nearer to an answer to the question
of where and how this race originated and developed. It is certain,
however, that the Nordics were originally located west of the Alpines
and Mongols and north of the Mediterraneans.
We have fossil records of five or six extinct species or genera of man
and more are constantly coming to light in Asia and outlying regions of
the Old World. The impulse that forced the ancestors of man to develop
his high energy and intelligence probably arose from the onset of the
Pleistocene glaciation a million or more years ago. Mankind was then
forced apart into widely separated areas where specific characters
developed in isolation. The Nordics were most likely cut off from Asia
by the Caspian and Aral Seas, which extended far to the north, where
they met the oncoming ice. It was west of this barrier that the Nordic
race developed its peculiar characters.
Later, when the ice retreated and this watery barrier disappeared, the
Nordics were inundated again and again by floods of Asiatics, first
Alpines and then Mongols. Sometimes the Nordics became the aggressors
and expanded eastward in turn, conquering Persia, India, and Burma.
Blond invaders of East Asia, called "the green-eyed devils," attacked
the Great Wall of China as late as 200 B.C. They were also called
"Wusuns," a Tatar word meaning "the tall ones." In the long run,
however, the Nordics were forced westward.
When the retreating glaciers left habitable land in Scandinavia, it was
into this region that the first westward migration of the Nordics found
its way. This was probably as early as 8000 B.C. There it was, through
the fogs and long winters of the north, that they developed in complete
isolation their great stature and musculature, their fair or flaxen
hair, and their blue eyes. The continental Nordics, however, who moved
westward to settle around the Baltic and North Seas, retained the more
generalized characters of brown hair of various shades, and eyes which
tend to either brown, gray, or, to a less extent, blue. The light eyes
of the Nordics include light brown or hazel, and may be of any and all
shades of gray and green to the deepest violet blue.
The racial characters which most noticeably distinguish the Nordics are
the colors of the skin, hair, and eyes. As sharply contrasted with the
skin of the Mediterranean peoples, the color of the blood shows through
the fair Nordic skin except when tanned by exposure to the sun. The
light-colored hair is almost always blond in youth, turning darker with
age, although in many individuals extreme blondness is retained through
life. The brown hair, characteristic of the Nordics of the British
Isles and America, runs from light to very dark brown; but blue-black
hair, so rare in England and among native Americans, is never Nordic.
The blond hair may tend towards golden red. In fact, in classic times,
red hair seems to have been more common than now and may be more
characteristic of the Celtic Nordics than of the Teutonic Nordics. In
race mixtures between blond and black-haired peoples, the blondness
tends to be lost.
On the other hand, light-colored eyes are much more persistent, and
this sign of Nordic admixture is found about ten times more frequently
than is blond hair among such peoples as the Albanians, where all other
Nordic characters except stature seem to have been lost.
For thousands of years, Europe has been an arena of racial mixtures.
Over great territories, as we shall see, the Nordic race has been
dominant for the past thirty centuries, so that the majority of Alpine
and Mediterranean types shows the impress of Nordic characters. For
example, in Bavaria are found short, stocky, round-skulled Alpines
with extremely blond hair and blue eyes. The French, who are today
preponderantly Alpine, show outcroppings of profound Nordic characters
throughout the population. Thus, while pure types exist everywhere in
sufficient numbers to enable us to define race, nevertheless there has
been so much intermixture in the past that it is hard sometimes to
assign a given individual to a specific race. The definition of race,
in fact, cannot be based on any one character, but on a preponderance
of many racial characters which make up the resultant type.
We have now considered the main races of mankind, but should devote
space to the Mongols and their derivatives. The Mongol is undoubtedly
a very ancient and major subdivision of the Hominidæ, but appears to be
intrusive in much of its present range. In Southeast Asia and in the
Malay countries and islands it arrived later than the ancient Negroids.
The Mongoloids, as stated above, are characterized by a short, stocky
build and generally a round skull, very straight black hair with a
round cross section, a broad flat face with projecting malar bones, and
a slanting eye often marked by the Mongol fold. The last characters
distinguish them from the Alpine race, but are sometimes to be found in
such members of that race as have a Mongoloid admixture.
These Mongolian characters occur often in Bohemia, in Moravia, and
especially in Galicia, in which last province they probably date from
the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Such traits, however,
are not found among the Alpines of southern Germany or France.
In the American Indians, Mongoloid blood undoubtedly predominates but
the high-bridged nose of some of the tribes and their high stature
undoubtedly point to admixture with other races.
The Mongol is not inferior to the Nordic in intelligence, as is the
Negro, but represents such a divergent type that the mixture between
Nordics and Chinese or Japanese is not a good one. The overflow of
these Asiatics into our Pacific Coast might have Mongolized the States
there, had not the American laboring man taken alarm and secured
legislation forbidding their immigration.
With the foregoing as a simple and generalized description of the
primitive races of mankind as we know them today, and with special
emphasis on the three principal European variants of the "white" race,
we shall proceed to consider the distribution and racial influence of
the Nordics in western Europe.
III
THE NORDIC CONQUEST OF EUROPE
About 1300 B.C. a blond, blue-eyed race of Libyans appears in Egyptian
sculptures. Whence these blonds came or how they got into Libya is
not known, but it is interesting to note that blond Berbers are to be
found today in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. These, however, are
probably more recent arrivals from the north.
About 1800 B.C. traces of Nordic infiltration appeared among the
Hittites. These Nordic conquerors later entered Mesopotamia as the
Mitanni and the Kassites, although it may be that they were only the
ruling classes of these peoples.
In recorded history the Nordics first appear in the West as Achæans.
They came from the North from the Dacian Plains and conquered Greece
and Phrygia about 1400 or 1500 B.C.
About 1200 or 1300 B.C. a Nordic people, the Osco-Umbrians, sweeping
down from the northeast, entered Italy. They were kindred to the
Achæans and were the ancestors of the Latin tribes, including the early
Romans. The aboriginal Mediterraneans were driven into southern Italy,
where, in Calabria and Apulia, they persist to this day. The contrast
between the peoples of North and South Italy is still profound.[2]
The Continental Nordics, as Celtic tribes, entered Gaul in the ninth
century B.C. From the evidence of place names, they passed through
South Germany. All Gaul except Aquitania, in the southwest, was
overwhelmed.
Spain was conquered by Celtic Nordics about 600 B.C., but their
domination was never complete and they soon mingled with the natives.
The mixed inhabitants of the peninsula were called Celtiberians by the
Romans.
During this same period the British Isles were overrun and thoroughly
occupied by Celtic Nordics named Goidels and the Celtic tongue was
imposed upon the Mediterranean population, although the latter survived
as a race in large numbers, especially in the western parts of England
and Ireland. These Celtic-speaking Mediterraneans were, until recently,
called "Iberians"; but fifteen hundred years ago the invading Saxons
called all the people they found in England "Welsh."
In about 300 B.C. a new wave of Celts entered Gaul and Britain. This
time they came from the German plains, speaking a somewhat different
form of Celtic. On the Continent they were known as the Belgæ and in
the British Isles as the Brythons. They gave their name to the British
Islands. By Cæsar's time they had conquered the northern third of Gaul
and all of England; but the Roman armies put an end to their farther
advance. They did not reach Ireland.
Roman writers describe the Celts in Gaul as pure Nordics and speak of
them as forming the ruling classes and military aristocracy until their
virtual destruction by Julius Cæsar in his ten years of conquest. His
campaigns in Gaul are said to have destroyed a million men, chiefly of
the warrior caste.
At the time of their greatest expansion the Gauls sacked Rome (387
B.C.). They pressed no farther south and soon retreated to and remained
in Cisalpine Gaul, that is, the valley of the Po and the country north
of the Apennines.
The Nordic Gauls or Galatians--to use the Greek form of their
name--devastated Greece about 297 B.C. and passed over into Asia Minor.
There they settled in what was long known as Galatia, now Angora, the
present seat of the Turkish Government. These Galatians were the last
Nordics to enter Asia Minor, if we except the armies of the Crusaders.
From the description of the physical characters of the Celtic-speaking
tribes they closely resembled the Germanic tribes that followed them
into the Roman Empire. Some French anthropologists find that the
present-day population of France is nearly four-fifths Alpine and they
have decided to call the Alpines "Celts," to avoid admitting that the
Celts were physically the same as the hated Germans. This error is not
shared by the leading French anthropologists, such as deLapouge, but it
has been accepted by some anthropologists.
Careful study of the references to the Celts by classic writers leaves
no doubt that the Gauls, Galatians, Belgæ, and Brythons were Nordics
as were their successors the Visigoths, Suevi, Alemanni, Burgundians,
and, above all, the Franks. In fact, France down to the time of the
Reformation was a Nordic land.
Soon after the time when the Belgæ first appear in Europe, Nordic
tribes speaking a Germanic dialect are mentioned in history. The
first of these tribes to come in conflict with the Romans were the
Teutones and Cimbri, who after defeating several Roman armies, were
utterly destroyed in 103 B.C. These people were the forerunners of many
tribes and nations which emerged, one after another, from the swamps
and forests of the north. The original home of most of them seems to
have been in Scandinavia, where they had been developing for several
thousand years. These newcomers were the latest and final linguistic
group to appear in the history of Europe. As Teutonic Nordics they have
dominated the scene ever since. The use of the word Teutonic is here
purely linguistic in order to distinguish these late comers from the
earlier, Celtic-speaking Nordic tribes.
The Teutonic Nordics formed a substantial element among the Belgæ
and Brythons and their expansion may well have been the cause of the
westward thrust of the latter. The Teutons began to press southward on
the Roman Empire early in the Christian era and this pressure continued
for some three centuries until the Empire collapsed under their
successive invasions.
As said above, the Celts and the Teutons were identical physically and
the use of the word "Celtic" cannot be justified as a racial term at
the present day. Among living Nordics, those of Celtic origin cannot
be distinguished physically from those of German or Scandinavian
extraction. Possibly red hair and the psychical peculiarities
associated with it may be rather more Celtic than Scandinavian. We find
in classical writers the names and description of the barbarians beyond
the borders of the Empire. They were all described as blue-eyed, fair
or red-haired giants. Height, however, must be considered as relative
to that of the Romans, whose legions in the later years of the empire
were apparently composed of small men. With each generation the names
applied to the barbarian tribes change, but the description of physical
characters remains the same.
The finest of these Teutonic barbarians were the Goths who, according
to their historian, Jordanes, crossed over from Sweden about 300 B.C.
and settled on the banks of the Vistula, whence they expanded into
South Russia, which they occupied for centuries. In fact, a remnant
of their language (Krim Götisch) was spoken in the Crimea until the
seventeenth century. The Gepidæ were a branch of the Goths who lay to
the west of the main body, and the Alans, a closely related tribe, were
located well to the east. It is interesting to note that some of the
Alans, fleeing from the Huns, took refuge in the Caucasus where the
Ossetes to this day show occasional Nordic physical characters.
The main body of the Gothic nation was split in two in 375 A.D. by the
invasion of the Huns, a Tatar people from Central Asia. Those who took
refuge in the west, in South Germany and Gaul, were called Visigoths.
A part of the Visigoths, however, fled across the Danube, devastated
the provinces of the Byzantine Empire and slew the reigning emperor,
Valens, in 378 A.D.
The eastern branch, or Ostrogoths, were conquered by the Huns and
remained in Dacia. Later, after Attila's death and the disruption of
his empire, the Ostrogoths, under the great Theodoric, invaded Italy
and came near to building a unified Italian nation nearly fourteen
hundred years ago.
The Visigoths, who had been long in contact with Roman civilization,
occupied Gaul. When Attila crossed the Rhine in 451 A.D. they fought
on the side of the Romans at Chalons, one of the decisive battles of
history, and their king, the Visigothic Theodoric, fell in the battle.
The Ostrogoths, on the other hand, were the best troops of the Hunnish
host.
The Visigoths entered Spain in 412 A.D. Their allies, the Suevi,
conquered and ruled Galicia and the provinces on the Atlantic which now
constitute Portugal. The invasion of Spain by the Visigoths resulted in
the expulsion of a closely related Teutonic people, the Vandals, who,
with their allies, a remnant of the Alans, crossed over into Africa
in 428 A.D. On the site of Carthage the Vandals erected a kingdom
which lasted a hundred years. They ruled the African coast westward to
the Atlantic, conquered and settled in Corsica and under their king,
Genseric, sacked Rome in 455 A.D.