The old long-headed stocks of the Steppe border in South Russia probably still form elements of the mixed Cossack populations, but the spreads of broad-heads both from the Carpathian forelands and from the Asiatic steppe have altered the average type a good deal. Asiatic broad-heads with the big cheek-bones and Tungus (often called Mongol) eyes have also long occupied the Arctic border of Russia, as Lapps, Samoyedes, &c., and, mixed with Nordics, they form the Finn populations. Their features have at times been said to be distinguishable right down the east side of the Baltic into East Prussia in individuals here and there; one certainly finds them now and again in Gothlanders and even in Swedes. The net result is that the long-headed type is not a dominant element in Russia, save perhaps in parts of the one time Baltic provinces, that is in the new Baltic States.
The line along which the hill masses of Central Europe grade down into the European plain that stretches from Ypres to the Urals is marked out in many ways in European life. Not far from it is the main line of European coalfields, a most momentous factor for modern times. It is a line of exchange towns of ancient renown. Near it is a belt of loess, that is of loose wind-blown material laid there in the interglacial phases of the Ice Age, so fine grained that it does not encourage and has never encouraged tree growth, though it is valuable for cultivation. The loess belt, because of its freedom from forest, was naturally of importance as a line of movement of early man as well as a line of early settlement, and it lay between the province of the long-heads (Nordics) and that of the broad-heads (Alpines). All along here are found and have long been found breeds originating from intimate inter-mixture of Nordic and Alpine stocks.
The general fact seems to be that the head form is derived from the Alpine, and so is broad, but the colouring is more usually inherited from the other side, and so is generally fair. There are many varieties with distinctive facial and other features, but the broad fact is that the southern zone of the European plain, where the two stocks have had much fractionated contact (contacts of small groups) in little clearings of the forests that grew in Neolithic times, is a region of Alpine-Nordic stocks which have spread to Britain and through the Danube gaps towards the Balkans as well as in many other directions.
The amount of intermixture and intermediacy on the south side of the mountain axis is less marked, for here there were not the same occasions for mingling of small groups. The broad-headed stocks have, however, spread downhill, and occupy a great deal of North Italy. They are of less consequence in the Iberian Peninsula; the Balkan Peninsula is and probably has been their home from early times. A broad-headed stock with markedly dark colouring and frequently massive build is found on coastal patches here and there along the Mediterranean shores and on the coasts of Western Europe. It occurs as an important percentage in many coastal communities, and is almost certainly composed of survivors of prospectors and traders of the dawn of the Bronze Age and some later periods.
These few references must suffice to illustrate the kind of modification which the early and fundamental racial distribution has undergone; it may be condensed into the statement that broad-headedness has on the whole spread downhill, and has increasingly limited long-headedness to the fringes of Europe. It has done this not so much by sheer replacement of population as through its biological advantage of dominance over long-headedness in many cases of mixture. There has, however, been a definite spread of people of broad-headed type into the Russian plain, as well as many movements of peoples, to some of which we get references in the early chapters of written history.
2
Language Families—Introductory
The languages of the European peoples are to a large extent grouped into Celtic, Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families, all of which have sufficiently similar features to be classed together with Sanskrit as Indo-European or, to use a much-disputed term, Aryan. Asiatic immigrants into Europe both in Arctic regions and on the steppes of South Russia have brought in Asiatic languages which have managed to persist as far west as Lapland, Finland, Esthonia, and Hungary, but they are not sufficient to affect the general statement.
The prior home of the Indo-European languages has been discussed almost ad nauseam, and it is still so unsettled a question as to make it unprofitable to discuss afresh whether that home was on the Asiatic steppe, in the mountain and plateau country from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, on the grassland borders of South Russia, or somewhere near the Baltic.
It would at any rate seem that these languages did not originate in the Mediterranean, and that the languages of that region in pre-classical times were of other affinities. Minoan, Etruscan, &c., are still undeciphered. If then the classical languages came into that region from outside, the probabilities are that they came in from the north, where are found related languages which have certainly not come from the Mediterranean.