Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

1. Where its most ancient residence and greatest numbers were in earliest historic times.

2. Where the prehistoric remains prolong that residence most remotely back.

3. Where the earliest forms of linguistic structure continue to exist in large communities.

4. Where its purest types are retained in considerable numbers.

5. Where the climatic conditions are favorable to the physical traits of the race.

If we can select a locality in which all of these arguments unite, the cumulative evidence is so powerful that we may consider the question settled.

I have already shown that at the dawn of history the white race possessed either in Europe or Africa a far larger area than in Asia, and possessed it practically exclusively. The most recent researches in the pile dwellings of the Swiss lakes and the plain of the Po show that the same race inhabited them from the classic period of Greece to far back in the stone age.

The most ancient shell-heaps or kitchen-middens on the shores of Portugal contain skulls of the peculiar type of the Basques of to-day. The hiatus or gap which was once supposed to exist between palæolithic and neolithic culture in France has been bridged over by numerous observations, showing that the same race continued to live and grow there.[52] As for language, every linguist recognizes the agglutinative type of the Basque, and the semi-agglutinative character of the Berber as more antique forms than the inflectional caste of Aryan or Semitic tongues. Nowhere else do white tribes speak an agglutinative tongue, except a few in the Caucasus, where we know they settled at a comparatively recent period.

The purest types of the whites in any large number have always been found in Western Europe and Northwestern Africa. There the blondes were represented by the Suevi, the Goths, the Vandals, the Cymri, the Berbers; the brunettes by the Euskarians, the Celts, and the native Italic tribes. In the Orient, the Parsees, the high-caste Brahmins, the Siagosch of the Hindu Kusch, and some Caucasian tribes, have by close intermarriage retained in a measure the traits of the race; but confessedly not in the same distinctness as the nations of Western Europe; nor do the Semitic peoples of Asia present the purity of the type with anything like the distinctness of the descendants of the Libyans in the valleys of the Atlas. Finally, we do not anywhere in Asia find the physical conditions favorable to the development of the white race—the moist, cool, cloudy climate, the extensive shady forests covering broad areas of low elevation, with absence of malaria and diminished demand on the chylopoietic organs.