Man, Past and Present by Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (free reads .TXT) 📕

More acrimonious than the discussion of the original home is the dispute as to the original physical type of the Indo-European-speaking people. It was almost a matter of faith with Germans that the language was introduced by tall fair dolichocephals of Nordic type. On the other hand the Gallic school sought to identify the Alpine race as the only and original Aryans. The futility of the whole discussion is ably demonstrated by W. Z. Ripley in his protest against the confusion of language and race[1207]. Feist[1208] summarises our information as follows. All that we can say about the physical type of the "Urvolk" is that since the Indo-Europeans came from a northerly region[1209] (not yet identified) it is surmised that they belonged to the light-skinned people. The observation that mountain folk of Indo-Germanic speech in southern areas, such as the Ossets of the Caucasus, the Kurds of the uplands of Armenia and Irania, and the Tajiks of the western Pamirs not infrequently exhibit fair hair or blue eyes supports this view. Nevertheless, as he points out, brachycephals are not hereby excluded. His own conclusion, which naturally results from a review of the whole evidence, is that the "Urvolk" was not a pure race, but a mixture of different types. Already in neolithic times races in Europe were no longer pure, and in France "formed an almost inextricable medley" and Feist assumes with E. de Michelis[1210] that the Indo-Europeans were a conglomerate of peoples of different origins who in prehistoric times were welded together into an ethnic unity, as the present English have been formed from pre-Indo-European Caledonians (Picts and Scots), Celts, Roman traders and soldiers and later Teutonic settlers[1211].

The evidence that Indo-Europeans were already in existence in Mesopotamia, Syria and Irania about the middle of the second millennium B.C. has already been mentioned. About the same time the Vedic hymns bear witness to the appearance of the Aryans of Western India. The formation of an Aryan group with a common language, religion and culture is a process necessarily requiring considerable length of time, so that their swarming off from the Indo-European parent group must be pushed back to far into the third millennium. At this period there are indications of the settling of the Greeks in the southern promontories of the Balkan peninsula at latest about 2000 B.C., while Thracian and Illyrian peoples may have filled the mainland, though the Dorians occupied Epirus, Macedonia, and perhaps Southern Illyria. Indo-European stocks were already in occupation of Central Italy. It would appear therefore that the period of the Indo-European community, before the migrations, must be placed at the end of the Stone Ages, at the time when copper was first introduced. Thus it seems legitimate to infer that the expansion of the Indo-Europeans began about 2500 B.C. and the furthest advanced branches entered into the regions of the older populations and cultures at latest after the beginning of the second millennium[1212]. About 1000 B.C. we find three areas occupied by Indo-European-speaking peoples, all widely separated from each other and apparently independent. These are (1) the Aryan groups in Asia; (2) the Balkan peninsula together with Central and Lower Italy, and the Mysians and Phrygians of Asia Minor (possibly the Thracians had already advanced across the Danube); and (3) Teutons, Celts and Letto-Slavs over the greater part of Germany and Scandinavia, perhaps also already in Eastern France and in Poland. The following centuries saw the advance of Iranians to South Russia and further west, the pressing of the Phrygians into Armenia, and lastly the Celtic migrations in Western Europe.

From the linguistic and botanical evidence brought forward by the Polish botanist Rostafinski[1213] the ancestors of the Celts, Germans and Balto-Slavs must have occupied a region north of the Carpathians, and west of a line between Koenigsberg and Odessa (the beech and yew zone). The Balto-Slavs subsequently lost the word for beech and transferred the word for yew to the sallow and black alder (both with red wood) but their possession of a word for hornbeam locates their original home in Polesie--the marshland traversed by the Pripet but not south or east of Kiev.

Although, owing to the absence of Teutonic inscriptions before the third or fourth century A.D. it is difficult to trace the Nordic peoples with any certainty during the Bronze or Early Iron Ages, yet the fairly well-defined group of Bronze Age antiquities, covering the basin of the Elbe, Mecklenburg, Holstein, Jutland, Southern Sweden and the islands of the Belt have been conjectured with much probability to represent early Teutonic civilisation. "Whether we are justified in speaking of a Teutonic race in the anthropological sense is at least doubtful, for the most striking characteristics of these peoples [as deduced from prehistoric skeletons, descriptions of ancient writers and present day statistics] occur also to a considerable extent among their eastern and western neighbours, where they can hardly be ascribed altogether to Teutonic admixture. The only result of anthropological investigation which so far can be regarded as definitely established is that the old Teutonic lands in Northern Germany, Denmark and Southern Sweden have been inhabited by people of the same type since the neolithic age if not earlier[1214]." This type is characterised by tall stature, long narrow skull, light complexion with light hair and eyes[1215].

During the age of national migrations, from the fourth to the sixth century, the territories of the Nordic peoples were vastly extended, partly by conquest, and partly by arrangement with the Romans. But these movements had begun before the new era, for we hear of the Cimbriinvading Illyricum, Gaul and Italy in the second century B.C. probably from Jutland[1216], where they were apparently associated with the Teutoni. Still earlier, in the third century B.C., the Bastarnae, said by many ancient writers to have been Teutonic in origin, invaded and settled between the Carpathians and the Black Sea. Already mentioned doubtfully by Strabo as separating the Germani from the Scythians (Tyragetes) about the Dniester and Dnieper, their movements may now be followed by authentic documents from the Baltic to the Euxine. Furtwaengler[1217] shows that the earliest known German figures are those of the Adamklissi monument, in the Dobruja, commemorating the victory of Crassus over the Bastarnae, Getae, and Thracians in 28 B.C. The Bastarnae migrated before the Cimbri and Teutons through the Vistula valley to the Lower Danube about 200 B.C. They had relations with the Macedonians, and the successes of Mithridates over the Romans were due to their aid. The account of their overthrow by Crassus in Dio Cassius is in striking accord with the scenes on the Adamklissi monument. Here they appear dressed only in a kind of trowsers, with long pointed beards, and defiant but noble features. The same type recurs both on the column of Trajan, who engaged them as auxiliaries in his Dacian wars, and on the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, here however wearing a tunic, a sign perhaps of later Roman influences. And thus after 2000 years are answered Strabo's doubts by modern archaeology.

Much later there followed along the same beaten track between the Baltic and Black Sea a section of the Goths, whom we find first settled in the Baltic lands in proximity to the Finns. The exodus from this region can scarcely have taken place before the second century of the new era, for they are still unknown to Strabo, while Tacitus locates them on the Baltic between the Elbe and the Vistula. Later Cassiodorus and others bring them from Scandinavia to the Vistula, and up that river to the Euxine and Lower Danube. Although often regarded as legendary[1218], this migration is supported by archaeological evidence. In 1837 a gold torque with a Gothic inscription was found at Petroassa in Wallachia, and in 1858 an iron spear-head with a Gothic name in the same script, which dates from the first Iron Age, turned up near Kovel in Volhynia. The spear-head is identical with one found in 1865 at Muenchenberg in Brandenburg, on which Wimmer remarks that "of 15 Runic inscriptions in Germany the two earliest occur on iron pikes. There is no doubt that the runes of the Kovel spear-head and of the ring came from Gothic tribes[1219]." These Southern Goths, later called Moeso-Goths, because they settled in Moesia (Bulgaria and Servia), had certain physical and even moral characters of the Old Teutons, as seen in the Emperor Maximinus, born in Thrace of a Goth by an Alan woman--very tall, strong, handsome, with light hair and milk-white skin[1220], temperate in all things and of great mental energy.

Before their absorption in the surrounding Bulgar and Slav populations the Moeso-Goths were evangelised in the fourth century by their bishop Ulfilas ("Wolf"), whose fragmentary translation of Scripture, preserved in the Codex Argenteus of Upsala, is the most precious monument of early Teutonic speech extant.

To find the pure Nordic type at the present day we must seek for it in Scandinavia, which possesses one of the most highly individualised populations in Europe. The Osterdal, and the neighbourhood of Vaage in Upper Gudbrandsdal in Norway, and the Dalarna district in Sweden contain perhaps the purest Teutonic type in all Europe, the cephalic index falling well below 78. But along the Norwegian coasts there is a strong tendency to brachycephaly (the index rising to 82-3), combined with a darkening of the hair and eye colour (the type occurs also in Denmark), indicating an outlying lodgement of the Alpine race from Central Europe. The anthropological history of Scandinavia, according to Ripley, is as follows: "Norway has ... probably been peopled from two directions, one element coming from Sweden and another from the south by way of Denmark. The latter type, now found on the sea coast and especially along the least attractive portion of it, has been closely hemmed in by the Teutonic immigration from Sweden[1221]." Brachycephalic people already occupied parts of Denmark in the Stone Age[1222], and, according to the scanty information available, the present population is extremely mixed. One-third of the children have light hair and light eyes, and tall stature coincides in the main with fair colouring, but in Bornholm where the cephalic index is 80 there is a taller dark type and a shorter light type, the latter perhaps akin to the Eastern variety of the Alpine race[1223].

The original Nordic type is by no means universally represented among the present Germanic peoples. From the examination made some years ago of 6,758,000 school children[1224], it would appear that about 31 per cent. of living Germans may be classed as blonds, 14 as brunettes, and 55 as mixed; and further that of the blonds about 43 per cent. are centred in North, 33 in Central and 24 in South Germany. The brunettes increase, generally speaking, southwards, South Bavaria showing only about 14 per cent. of blonds, and the same law holds good of the long-heads and the round-heads respectively. To what cause is to be attributed this profound modification of this branch of the Nordic type in the direction of the south?

That the Teutons ranged in considerable numbers far beyond their northern seats is proved by the spread of the German language to the central highlands, and beyond them down the southern slopes, where a rude High German dialect lingered on in the so-called "Seven Communes" of the Veronese district far into the nineteenth century. But after passing the Main, which appears to have long formed the ethnical divide for Central Europe, they entered the zone of the brown Alpine round-heads[1225], to whom they communicated their speech, but by whom they were largely modified in physical appearance. The process has for long ages been much the same everywhere--perennial streams of Teutonism setting steadily from the north, all