Several important historic peoples cannot yet be assigned with certainty to one or the other of the Ural-Altaic divisions, or are variously classified: thus the Huns, most likely to have been Turks; the White Huns or Ephthalites; the Avars; and the ancient Bulgars.
In northern and eastern Siberia there live, besides the Samoyed, a series of non-Ural-Altaic peoples, truly peripheral and retarded in culture, who seem once to have occupied larger areas but to have shrunk or been partially absorbed before Ural-Altaic expansion. These include the tribes sometimes grouped as Yeniseian; the Yukaghir; the Kamchadal-Koryak-Chukchi group; a few Eskimo who have either failed to cross Behring strait or have come across it from America; and perhaps the Ainu of Japan and Sakhalien. These have been called the Palæo-Asiatic peoples, though their diverse languages render their community of origin dubious. How far they may be considered as following a positively similar culture, except in direct response to an extreme climate, is also doubtful. Their rigorously marginal position and depriving environment stamp their culture with a preponderance of negative traits. The possession of domesticated reindeer is common to several of these peoples as well as to the Tungus and the Finno-Ugric Lapps of northern Russia and Scandinavia. Reindeer-breeding among these groups appears to be due to a transmission, in the sense of being a reflex of contact, an imitation of the cattle or horse breeding of the more favorably situated nations to the south. It is also interesting and probably significant that the American Eskimos never domesticated the reindeer, although they depended largely upon its hunt.
Racially the array of north and central Asiatic peoples shades from pronounced Caucasian to extreme Mongoloid type. The Mongols have given name to their whole larger racial stock, and the Tungus-Manchu and northeast Siberian savages clearly form part thereof. The Turks in the main are rather Caucasian, although all intergradations occur according to region; as also among the Finno-Ugrians. The Hungarians to-day are not only Caucasians but Alpines; the Finns definite Nordics; the Lapps a strange partial graft of Nordic traits on broad faced and broad headed Mongolian physique.
257. India
India is not a country, but a connected block of lands shut off from the remainder of the world by lofty mountains and harboring a population approximating those of Europe and of China. Its 300,000,000 inhabitants constitute nearly a fifth of humanity. Historically, India forms a continent as fully as does Africa. Culturally, it must be equated with the Occidental or Mediterranean area and with China as one of the three great and substantially coördinate focal points which civilization developed in the eastern hemisphere.
Racially the peoples of India are prevailingly Caucasian, but both the two other great stocks are represented. Nearly everywhere, but especially in the south, there is an evident admixture of a dark skinned, broad nosed, long headed type. This is more likely to have had Australoid than Negro affinities before its absorption; remnants of it, like the Veddas of Ceylon and Irulas and some other tribes of the Deccan, are often grouped with more easterly peoples as representatives of an original Indo-Australoid race (§ [24], [27], [260]). So far as this race can be reconstructed, it seems to have been less Negroid than the Australian of to-day; that is, it possessed more Caucasian resemblances. In fact, it might almost be described as proto-Caucasian. In this light the modern Hindu[37] would be a varying mixture of two related strains—the undifferentiated proto-Caucasian, approximating the Australian and perhaps having ultimate Negroid relations without being Negroid; and the specialized Caucasian typical of the Occident; the former strongest in the south, the latter almost pure in the northwest of India. This hypothesis has this to commend it: it squares with the facts that the Hindu in spite of his dark complexion makes almost universally the impression of being essentially “white” in race; and that he differs outstandingly from what a mulatto-like blend of Negro and Caucasian would be.
In the north and east of India, Mongolian resemblances begin to appear, as the natural result of thousands of years of contact of two stocks.
It would seem that the proportions of racial blood in India, and in the rough their geographical distribution, parallel the proportions of the numbers of speakers of tongues belonging to the several families. More than three-fourths of the Hindus speak Indo-European dialects. Most of the remainder are Dravidas in the south and Kolarians in the east central parts—the same regions in which the Indo-Australoid or proto-Caucasian element is most conspicuous. Along the northeastern edge, Tibeto-Burman speech has spilled in with the Mongolian type. However, while the races have blended, the languages have remained distinct. As almost everywhere, the linguistic classification is therefore clearer cut in India than the racial one. Consequently it is misleading to infer from a Hindu’s speaking a Sanskrit-derived language that his Caucasian blood is pure, or conversely to conclude that all Dravidians have broad noses and black skins.
The Kolarians have been thought by some to possess ancient linguistic relatives to the east (§ [50]), and certainly possess cultural ones in this direction (§ [262]). Dravidian speech has not been thus connected, even tentatively, and one indication points to its former westward extension: the Brahui language in Beluchistan, which appears to be the remnant of an old Dravidian offshoot.
The ancient culture of India is inadequately known. Archæological exploration and analysis have been insufficient; yet they have gone far enough to suggest that the prehistoric development followed different lines from those in the West, so that the findings of European prehistory cannot be applied to interpret such knowledge as there is on India. Thus the Lower Palæolithic stage is well represented in India, but there is nothing to show whether or not it was contemporaneous with that of Europe. There is some possibility that it passed into the Neolithic without the intervening Upper Palæolithic which is so important in western Europe (§ [213]). It seems dubious whether there was a true Bronze Age in India. More pre-iron implements of pure copper seem to have been found than of tin bronze.