From that day to this in France, Bavaria, and elsewhere in western Europe as well as in eastern Europe the round skulls have expanded their range. This steady increase of round-skull Alpines everywhere in Central Europe in recent centuries is one of the most ominous racial facts that confront us.
The great French anthropologist, deLapouge, stated in a recent letter to the author that in France the cranial index has risen two points a century since the Middle Ages, so that France is no longer a Nordic land. This transformation is due, in the opinion of some observers, to a mixture of race in which round-headedness is dominant over long-headedness. In the opinion of the writer, however, it is due to the replacement of one race, the Nordic, by another, the Alpine. The Nordics not only incur disproportionate loss in war, but are also highly nomadic in habit, while the Alpines, on the other hand, stick close to the land and breed persistently.
Of the European races, there remains to be considered the Nordics, a people greatly specialized, who have developed a fair skin, light-colored eyes, tall stature of sturdy build, and long, i.e., dolichocephalic skulls, and definite mental traits. The slow but long-continued physical development of the Nordics has culminated in a powerful skeleton and musculature in sharp contrast to that of the Mediterranean race, to which the Nordic is more closely related than to any other. In fact, the mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in the British Islands may possibly be one of the few advantageous racial crossings.
As to the homeland of the original Nordic race, we have as yet only guesswork on the part of the anthropologist. When we shall know more about the condition of Central Eurasia during the glacial period and immediately thereafter, we may get nearer to an answer to the question of where and how this race originated and developed. It is certain, however, that the Nordics were originally located west of the Alpines and Mongols and north of the Mediterraneans.
We have fossil records of five or six extinct species or genera of man and more are constantly coming to light in Asia and outlying regions of the Old World. The impulse that forced the ancestors of man to develop his high energy and intelligence probably arose from the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation a million or more years ago. Mankind was then forced apart into widely separated areas where specific characters developed in isolation. The Nordics were most likely cut off from Asia by the Caspian and Aral Seas, which extended far to the north, where they met the oncoming ice. It was west of this barrier that the Nordic race developed its peculiar characters.
Later, when the ice retreated and this watery barrier disappeared, the Nordics were inundated again and again by floods of Asiatics, first Alpines and then Mongols. Sometimes the Nordics became the aggressors and expanded eastward in turn, conquering Persia, India, and Burma. Blond invaders of East Asia, called "the green-eyed devils," attacked the Great Wall of China as late as 200 B.C. They were also called "Wusuns," a Tatar word meaning "the tall ones." In the long run, however, the Nordics were forced westward.
When the retreating glaciers left habitable land in Scandinavia, it was into this region that the first westward migration of the Nordics found its way. This was probably as early as 8000 B.C. There it was, through the fogs and long winters of the north, that they developed in complete isolation their great stature and musculature, their fair or flaxen hair, and their blue eyes. The continental Nordics, however, who moved westward to settle around the Baltic and North Seas, retained the more generalized characters of brown hair of various shades, and eyes which tend to either brown, gray, or, to a less extent, blue. The light eyes of the Nordics include light brown or hazel, and may be of any and all shades of gray and green to the deepest violet blue.
The racial characters which most noticeably distinguish the Nordics are the colors of the skin, hair, and eyes. As sharply contrasted with the skin of the Mediterranean peoples, the color of the blood shows through the fair Nordic skin except when tanned by exposure to the sun. The light-colored hair is almost always blond in youth, turning darker with age, although in many individuals extreme blondness is retained through life. The brown hair, characteristic of the Nordics of the British Isles and America, runs from light to very dark brown; but blue-black hair, so rare in England and among native Americans, is never Nordic. The blond hair may tend towards golden red. In fact, in classic times, red hair seems to have been more common than now and may be more characteristic of the Celtic Nordics than of the Teutonic Nordics. In race mixtures between blond and black-haired peoples, the blondness tends to be lost.
On the other hand, light-colored eyes are much more persistent, and this sign of Nordic admixture is found about ten times more frequently than is blond hair among such peoples as the Albanians, where all other Nordic characters except stature seem to have been lost.
For thousands of years, Europe has been an arena of racial mixtures. Over great territories, as we shall see, the Nordic race has been dominant for the past thirty centuries, so that the majority of Alpine and Mediterranean types shows the impress of Nordic characters. For example, in Bavaria are found short, stocky, round-skulled Alpines with extremely blond hair and blue eyes. The French, who are today preponderantly Alpine, show outcroppings of profound Nordic characters throughout the population. Thus, while pure types exist everywhere in sufficient numbers to enable us to define race, nevertheless there has been so much intermixture in the past that it is hard sometimes to assign a given individual to a specific race. The definition of race, in fact, cannot be based on any one character, but on a preponderance of many racial characters which make up the resultant type.