RACES AND PEOPLES OF EUROPE.
Problem of European ethnogeny—I. ANCIENT INHABITANTS OF EUROPE—Prehistoric races—Quaternary period—Glacial and interglacial periods—Quaternary skulls—Spy and Chancelade races or types—Races of the neolithic period—Races of the age of metals—Aryan question—Position of the problem—Migration of European peoples in the historic period—II. EUROPEAN RACES OF THE PRESENT DAY—Characteristics of the six principal races and the four secondary races—III. PRESENT PEOPLES OF EUROPE—A. Aryan peoples: Latins, Germans, Slavs, Letto-Lithuanians, Celts, Illyro-Hellenes—B. Anaryan peoples: Basques, Finns, etc.—C. Caucasian peoples: Lesgians, Georgians, etc.
Of all parts of the world Europe presents the most favourable conditions for the interblending of peoples. Easy of access, a mere peninsula of Asia, from which the Ural mountains and straits a few miles wide hardly separate it, Europe has a totally different configuration from the continental colossus, heavy and vague in outline, to which it is attached. Indented by numberless gulfs, bays, and creeks, provided with several secondary peninsulas, crossed by rivers having no cataracts, and for the most part navigable, it offers every facility for communication and change of place to ethnic groups. Thus from the dawn of history, and even from prehistoric times, a perpetual eddying has taken place there, a coming and going of peoples in search of fortune and better settlements.
These migrations, combined with innumerable wars and active commerce, have produced such a blending of races, such successive changes in the manners and customs and languages spoken, that it is very difficult to separate from this chaos the elements of European ethnogeny, and that in spite of the great number of historical and linguistic works published on the subject. We may, however, thanks to the progress in prehistoric, anthropological, and ethnographical studies, obtain a glimpse of the main outlines of this ethnogeny, in which history and linguistics give us often but vague, and in any case very slight information.
The better to understand the distribution of races at the present day, we must cast a glance at those which are extinct, going back to geological times removed from us by several hundreds or even thousands of centuries.
I.—ANCIENT INHABITANTS OF EUROPE.
Geological Times.—The portions of Europe emerging towards the end of the tertiary period of the geological history of our globe have been inhabited by man, probably from this very time, and assuredly from the quaternary period which succeeded it—the predecessor of the present geological period. The existence of tertiary man in Europe has not, however, been directly proved. The finds of artificially chipped flints in the miocene and pliocene beds in France (at Thenay, Puy-Courny, and Saint-Prest), in England (the uplands of Kent, Cromer), and in Portugal (Otta, near Lisbon); the discovery made in Italy (Monte Aperto) of bones with rude carvings on them, asserted to be the work of pliocene man, and so many other interesting facts, are now called in question by leading men of science, and have few supporters at the present day.[337] In every case in these finds we have to deal only with objects supposed to be worked by man, or by some hypothetical being, for no remains of human bones have been found up to the present time in the tertiary beds of Europe.[338]
It is only in quaternary beds that the presence of human bones has been ascertained beyond question. The quaternary age in Europe is characterised, as we know, by the succession of “glacial periods,” each of which comprises a greater or less extension of glaciers, followed by their withdrawal (“interglacial periods”), with accompanying changes of climate. The well-known geologist Geikie[339] claims, from the end of the pliocene age to proto-historic times, the existence in Europe of six glacial periods; but most other geologists (Penck, Boule) reduce this number to two or three, considering the movements of the glaciers of some of Geikie’s periods as purely local phenomena, having exercised no influence on the continent as a whole.
At the beginning of quaternary times the climate of Europe was not the same as that of the present day; hot and moist, it was favourable to the growth of a sub-tropical flora. Dense forests gave shelter to animals which no longer exist in our latitudes—the Elephas meridionalis, a survival of the pliocene age, the Rhinoceros Etruscus, etc.
But soon, from causes still imperfectly known, ice began to accumulate around certain elevated points of Northern Europe; a veritable “mer de glace” covered all Scandinavia, almost the whole of Great Britain, the emerged lands which were between these two countries, as well as the north of Germany and half of Russia.[340] This is the first glacial period, or the period of the great spread of glaciers ([Map 1]). Such an accumulation of ice, combined with a change of climate, which had become cold and moist, was not very favourable to the peopling of the country. Besides, if we consider that all the great mountain chains, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Caucasian range, with their advanced peaks, were covered entirely with ice, and that the Aralo-Caspian depression was filled with water as far as the vicinity of Kazan on the north ([Map 1]), we shall easily understand that the habitable space thus available for man at this period in Europe was very restricted.