Passing of the Great Race — The Alpine Race

IV THE ALPINE RACE

The Alpine race is clearly of Eastern and Asiatic origin.

It forms the westernmost extension of a widespread subspecies which, outside of Europe, occupies Asia Minor, Iran, the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush.

In fact the western Himalayas were probably its original centre of evolution and radiation and among its Asiatic members is a distinct subdivision, the Armenoids.

The Alpine race is distinguished by a round face and correspondingly round skull which in the true Armenians has a peculiar sugarloaf shape, a character which can be easily recognized.

The Alpines must not be confounded with the slit-eyed Mongols who centre around Thibet and the steppes of north Asia.

The fact that both these races are round skulled does not involve identity of origin any more than the long skulls of the Nordics and of the Mediterraneans require that they be both considered of the same subspecies, although good anthropologists have been misled by this parallelism.

The Alpines are of stocky build and moderately short stature, except sometimes where they have been crossed with Nordic elements.

This race is also characterized by dark hair, except where there has been a strong Nordic admixture as in south Germany and Switzerland.

In Europe at the present time the eye, also, is usually dark but sometimes grayish.

The ancestral Proto-Alpines from the highlands of western Asia must, of course, have had brunet eyes and very dark, probably black, hair.

Whether we are justified in considering gray eyes as peculiar to populations of mixed Alpine and Nordic blood is difficult to determine, but one thing is certain, the combination of blue eyes and flaxen hair is never Alpine.

The European Alpines retain very little evidence of their Asiatic origin except the skull shape and have been in contact with the Nordic race so long that in central and western Europe they are everywhere saturated with the blood of that race.

Many populations now considered good Germans, such as the majority of the Würtembergers, Bavarians, Austrians, Swiss and Tyrolese are merely Nordicized Alpines.

While the Swiss are to-day neither tall nor long-headed, their country was thoroughly conquered early in the Christian era by the Nordic Alemanni who entered from the Rhine Valley.

The exodus of soldiers from the forest cantons throughout the Middle Ages to fight as mercenaries in France and Italy gradually drained off this Nordic element until the chief evidence of its former existence lies to-day in the large amount of blondness among the Swiss.

With the loss of this type the nation has ceased to be a military community.

The first appearance in Europe of the Alpines dates from the Azilian Period when it is represented by the Furfooz-Grenelle race.

There were later several invasions of this race which entered Europe from the Asia Minor plateaux, by way of the Balkans and the valley of the Danube, during Neolithic times and, also, at the beginning of the Bronze Age.

It appears also to have passed north of the Black Sea, as some slight traces have been discovered there of round skulls which long antedate the existing population but the Russian brachycephaly of to-day is of much later origin and is due mainly to the eastward spread of Alpines from the regions of the Carpathians since the first centuries of our era.

This race in its final expansion far to the northwest ultimately reached Norway, Denmark and Holland and planted among the dolichocephalic natives small colonies of round skulls, which still exist.

These colonies are found along the coast and while of small extent are clearly marked.

On the southwestern seaboard of Norway these round heads are dark and relatively short.

When this invasion reached the extreme northwest of Europe its energy was spent and the invaders were soon forced back into central Europe by the Nordics.

The Alpines at this time of maximum extension about 1800 B. C.

crossed into Britain and a few reached Ireland and introduced bronze into both these islands.

As the metal appears about the same time in Sweden it is safe to assume that it was introduced by this invasion.

The men of the Round Barrows in England were Alpines, but their numbers were so scanty that they have left behind them in the skulls of the living population but little demonstrable evidence of their former presence.

If we are ever able accurately to analyze the various strains that enter in more or less minute quantities into the blood of the British nation, we shall find many traces of these Round Barrow men as well as other interesting and ancient remnants especially in the western isles and peninsulas.

In the study of European populations the great and fundamental fact about the British Isles is the almost total absence there to-day of true Alpine round skulls.

It is the only important state in Europe in which the round skulls play no part and the only nation of any rank composed solely of Nordic and Mediterranean races in approximately equal numbers.

To this fact are undoubtedly due many of the individualities and much of the greatness of the English people.

The cephalic index in England is rather low, about 78, but there is a type of tall men, with a tendency to roundheadedness allied to a very marked intellectual capacity, known as the “Beaker Maker” type.

They are probably descended from the men of the Round Barrows, who while brachycephalic were tall and presumably dark and entered England on the east and northeast.

The Beaker Makers appear at the very end of the Neolithic and, at least in the case of the last of them to arrive, are identified with the Bronze Age.

Before this tall, round-headed type reached Britain, they had absorbed many Nordic elements and they have nothing except the skull shape in common with the Alpines living closest, those of Belgium and France.

However, they do suggest strongly the Dinaric race of the Tyrol and Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic.

In addition to the Beaker Makers remains of short, thick-set brachycephs have also been found in small numbers.

These last appear to have been true Alpines.

The invasion of central Europe by Alpines, which occurred in the Neolithic, following in the wake of the Azilian forerunners of the same type—the Furfooz-Grenelle race—represented a very great advance in culture.

They brought with them from Asia the art of domesticating animals and the first knowledge of the cereals and of pottery and were an agricultural race in sharp contrast to the flesh eating hunters who preceded them.

The Neolithic populations of the lake dwellings in Switzerland and the extreme north of Italy, which flourished about 5000 B. C.

, all belonged to this Alpine race.

A comparison of the scanty physical remains of these lake dwellers with the inhabitants of the existing villages on the lake shores demonstrates that the skull shape has changed little or not at all during the last seven thousand years and affords us another proof of the persistency of physical characters.

This Alpine race in Europe is now so thoroughly acclimated that it is no longer Asiatic in any respect and has nothing in common with the Mongols except its round skulls.

Such Mongolian elements as exist to-day in scattered groups throughout eastern Europe are remnants of the later invasions of Tatar hordes which, beginning with Attila in the fifth century, ravaged eastern Europe for hundreds of years.

In western and central Europe the present distribution of the Alpine race is a substantial recession from its earlier extent and it has been everywhere conquered and subordinated by Celtic- and Teutonic-speaking Nordics.

Beginning with the first appearance of the Celtic-speaking Nordics in western Europe, the Alpine race has been obliged to give ground but has mingled its blood everywhere with the conquerors and now after centuries of obscurity it appears to be increasing again at the expense of the master race.

The Alpines reached Spain, as they reached Britain, in small numbers and with spent force but they still persist along the Cantabrian Alps as well as among the French Basques on the northern side of the Pyrenees.

The Anaryan Basque or Euskarian language may be a derivative of the original speech of these Alpines, as its affinities point eastward and toward Asia rather than southward and toward the littoral of Africa and the Hamitic speech of the Mediterranean Berbers.

Basque was probably related to the extinct Aquitanian.

The Ligurian language, also seemingly Anaryan, if ever closely deciphered may throw some light on the subject.

There are dim traces all along the north African coast of a round skull invasion about 3000 B. C.

through Syria, Egypt, Tripoli and Tunis and from there through Sicily to southern Italy.

The Alpine race forms to-day, as in Cæsar’s time, the great bulk of the population of central France with a Nordic aristocracy resting upon it.

They occupy as the lower classes the uplands of Belgium, where, known as Walloons, they speak an archaic French dialect closely related to the ancient _langue d’oïl_.

They form a majority of the upland population of Alsace, Lorraine, Baden, Würtemberg, Bavaria, Tyrol, Switzerland and northern Italy; in short, of the entire central _massif_ of Europe.

In Bavaria and the Tyrol the Alpines are so thoroughly Nordicized that their true racial affinities are betrayed by their round skulls alone.

When we reach Austria we come in contact with the Slavic-speaking nations which form a subdivision of the Alpine race appearing relatively late in history and radiating from the Carpathian Mountains.

In western and central Europe in relation to the Nordic race the Alpine is everywhere the ancient, underlying and submerged type.

The fertile lands, river valleys and cities are here in the hands of the Nordics but in eastern Germany and Poland we find conditions reversed.

That is an old Nordic broodland with a Nordic substratum underlying the bulk of the peasantry, which now consists of round skulled Alpine Slavs.

On top of these again we have an aristocratic upper class of comparatively recent introduction and of Saxon origin in eastern Germany.

In Austria this upper class is Swabian and Bavarian.

The introduction of Slavs into eastern Germany is believed to have been by infiltration and not by conquest.

In the fourth century these Wends were called Venethi, Antes and Sclaveni, and were described as strong in numbers but despised in war.

Through the neglect of the Teutons they had been allowed to range far and wide from their homes near the northeastern Carpathians and to occupy the lands formerly belonging to the Nordic nations, who had abandoned their country and flocked into the Roman Empire.

Goth, Burgund, Lombard and Vandal were replaced by the lowly Wend and Sorb, whose descendants to-day form the privates in the east German regiments, while the officers are everywhere recruited from the Nordic upper class.

The mediæval relation of these Slavic tribes to the dominant Teuton is well expressed in the meaning—slave—which has been attached to their name in western languages.

The occupation of eastern Germany and Poland by the Slavs probably occurred from 400 A. D.

to 700 A. D.

but these Alpine elements were reinforced from the east and south from time to time during the succeeding centuries.

Beginning early in the tenth century, the Saxons under their Emperors, especially Henry the Fowler, turned their attention eastward and during the next two centuries they reconquered and thoroughly Germanized all this section of Europe.

A similar series of changes in racial predominance took place in Russia where in addition to a nobility largely Nordic a section of the population is of ancient Nordic type, although the bulk of the peasantry consists of Alpine Slavs.

The Alpines in eastern Europe are represented by various branches of the “Slavic” nations.

Their area of distribution was split into two sections by the occupation of the great Dacian plain first by the Avars about 600 A.

D.

and later by the Hungarians about 900 A. D.

These Avars and Magyars came from somewhere in eastern Russia beyond the sphere of Aryan speech and their invasions separated the northern Slavs, known as Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles, from the southern Slavs, known as Serbs and Croats.

These southern Slavs entered the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth century from the northeast and to-day form the great mass of the population there.

The centre of radiation of all these Slavic-speaking Alpines was located in the Carpathians, especially the Ruthenian districts of Galicia and eastward to the neighborhood of the Pripet swamps and the head-waters of the Dnieper in Polesia, where the Slavic dialects are believed to have developed and whence they spread throughout Russia about the eighth century.

These early Slavs were probably the Sarmatians of the Greek and Roman writers.

Their name “Venethi” seems to have been a later designation.

The original Proto-Slavic language being Aryan must have been at some distant date imposed by Nordics upon the Alpines, but its development into the present Slavic tongues was chiefly the work of Alpines.

In other words, the expansion of the Alpines of the Slavic-speaking group seems to have occurred after the Fourth Century and they have spread in the East over areas which were originally Nordic, very much as the Teutons had previously overrun and submerged the earlier Alpines in the West.

The Mongol, Tatar and Turk who invaded Europe much later reinforced the brachycephalic element in these countries.

To some extent the round skulled Alpines in Russia have been reinforced by way of the Caucasus and the route north of the Black Sea by their kindred in western Asia.

The greater part of the purely Asiatic types has been thoroughly absorbed and Europeanized except in certain localities in Russia more especially in the east and south, where Mongoloid tribes such as the Mordvins, Bashkirs and Kalmucks have maintained their type either in isolated and relatively large groups or side by side with their Slavic neighbors.

In both cases the isolation is maintained through religious and social differences.

The Avars preceded the Magyars in Hungary, but they have merged with the latter without leaving traces that can be identified.

Certain Mongoloid characters found in Bulgaria are believed, however, to be of Avar origin.

The original physical type of the Magyars and the European Turks has now practically vanished as a result of prolonged intermarriage with the original inhabitants of Hungary and the Balkans.

These tribes have left little behind but their language and, in the case of the Turks, their religion.

The brachycephalic Hungarians to-day resemble the Austrian Germans much more than they do the Slavic-speaking populations adjoining them on the north and south or the Rumanians on the east.

Driven onward by the Avars, the Bulgars appeared south of the Danube about the end of the seventh century, coming originally from eastern Russia where the remnants of their kindred still persist along the Volga.

To-day they conform physically in the western half of the country to the Alpine Serbs and in the eastern half to the Mediterranean race, as do also the Rumanians of the Black Sea coast.

Little or nothing remains of the ancestral Bulgars except their name.

Language, religion and nearly, but not quite all, of the physical type have disappeared.

The early members of the Nordic race in order to reach the Mediterranean world had to pass through the Alpine populations and must have absorbed a certain amount of Alpine blood.

Therefore the Umbrians in Italy and the Gauls of western Europe, while predominantly Nordic, were more mixed especially in the lower classes with Alpine blood than were the Belgæ or Cymry or their successors, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Alemanni, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Danes and Northmen, all of whom appear in history as Nordics of the so-called Teutonic group.

In some portions of their range notably Savoy and central France the Alpine race is much less affected by Nordic influence than elsewhere but on the contrary it shows signs of a very ancient admixture with Mediterranean and even earlier elements.

Brachycephalic Alpine populations in comparative purity still exist in the interior of Brittany as in Auvergne, although nearly surrounded by Nordic populations.

While the Alpines were everywhere overwhelmed and driven to the fastnesses of the mountains, the warlike and restless nature of the Nordics has enabled the more stable Alpine population to reassert itself slowly, and Europe is probably much less Nordic to-day than it was fifteen hundred years ago.

The early Alpines made very large contributions to the civilization of the world and were the medium through which many advances in culture were introduced from Asia into Europe.

This race at the time of its first appearance in the west brought to the nomad hunters a knowledge of agriculture and of primitive pottery and of domestication of animals and thus made possible a great increase in population and the establishment of permanent settlements.

Still later its final expansion was the means through which the knowledge of metals reached the Mediterranean and Nordic populations of the west and north.

Upon the appearance on the scene of the Nordics the Alpine race temporarily lost its identity and sank to the subordinate and obscure position which it still largely occupies.

In western Asia members of this race seemingly are entitled to the honor of the earliest Mesopotamian civilization of which we have knowledge, namely, that of Sumer and its northerly neighbor Accad in Mesopotamia.

It is also the race of early Elam and Media.

In fact, the basis of Mesopotamian civilization belongs to this race.

Later Babylonia and Assyria were Arabic and Semitic while Persia was Nordic and Aryan.

In classic, mediæval and modern times the Alpines have played an unimportant part in European culture and in western Europe they have been so thoroughly Nordicized that they exist rather as an element in Nordic race development than as an independent type.

There are, however, many indications in current history which point to an impending development of civilization in the Slavic branches of this race and the world must be prepared to face changes in the Russias which will, for good or for evil, bring them more closely into touch with western Europe.