The Races of Europe
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The Races of Europe is the title of two books related to the anthropology of Europeans. The first book was written by William Z. Ripley in 1899, and was positively received by both the scientific and lay community. In 1939, Harvard anthropologist Carleton Stevens Coon published a new, completely rewritten edition of the book.
Both books are an attempt to write a history and classification of "white" racial types, and draw most of their conclusions about race from morphological observation and anthropometric studies of individuals.
The book is available online at Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology (physical anthropology website).
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[edit] The Races of Europe (1899)
In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist and sociologist/anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, which had grown out of a series of lectures he had given at the Lowell Institute at Columbia in 1896. Ripley believed that "race" was the central engine to understanding human history, though his work also afforded environmental and non-biological factors, such as traditions, a strong weight as well. He believed, as he wrote in the introduction to Races of Europe, that:
- "Race, properly speaking, is responsible only for those peculiarities, mental or bodily, which are transmitted with constancy along the lines of direct physical descent from father to son. Many mental traits, aptitudes, or proclivities, on the other hand, which reappear persistently in successive populations may be derived from an entirely different source. They may have descented collaterally, along the lines of purly mental suggestion by virture of mere social contact with preceding generations."[1]
Ripley's book, originally written to help finance his children's education, became a very-well respected work of early twentieth-century anthropology, renowned for its careful writing and careful compilation (and criticism) of the data of many other anthropologists in Europe and the United States.
Ripley based his conclusions about race by correlating anthropometric data with geographical data, paying special attention to the use of the cephalic index, which at the time was considered a well-established measure (later research determined that it was largely an effect of the environment, however). From this and other socio-geographical factors, Ripley classified Europeans into three distinct races:
- Teutonic — members of the northern race were long-skulled (or dolichocephalic), tall in stature, and possessed pale eyes and skin.
- Mediterranean — members of the southern race were long-skulled (or dolichocephalic), short in stature, and possessed dark eyes and skin.
- Alpine — members of the central race were round-skulled (or brachycephalic), stocky in stature, and possessed intermediate eye and skin color.
Ripley's tripartite system of race put him at odds both with other scholars who insisted that there was only one European race, and those who insisted that there were dozens of European races (such as Joseph Deniker, who Ripley saw as his chief rival). Ripley was the first American recipient of the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1908 on account of his contributions to anthropology.
The Races of Europe, overall, became an influential book of the Progressive Era in the field of racial taxonomy.[2] Ripley's tripartite system was especially championed by Madison Grant, who changed Ripley's "Teutonic" type into Grant's own Nordic type (taking the name, but little else, from Deniker), which he postulated as a master race.[3] It is in this light that Ripley's work on race is usually remembered today, though little of Grant's supremacist ideology is present in Ripley's original work.
[edit] The Races of Europe (1939)
In 1933, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon was invited to write a new edition of Ripley's The Races of Europe, which he dedicated to Ripley. His entirely rewritten version of the book was published in 1939. At the time, Coon explicitly avoided the discussion of either blood groups or racial differences in intelligence, the latter of which he claimed to know "next to nothing about" at the time.[4]
[edit] Conclusions
The conclusions from the book entail the following:
- The "White" race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of sapiens and neandertals) types and Mediterranean (purely sapiens) types.
- The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
- Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic and settled there.
- The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
- When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, occurs the process of dinarization which produces an hybrid with non-intermediate features.
- The "White" race extends well beyond Europe into the Middle East, the Far East and even North Africa.
- The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock being a mixture of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans.
[edit] Illyrians as Dorians
Carleton S. Coon found a connection between the Illyrians and the Dorians based on his anthropological analyses of the Albanian and Montenegrin population as well as the Sfakian population in Crete. Coon discovered that Montenegro and Albania is highly concentrated Illyrian racial zone and that the Sfakians are directly descended from Doric tribes that invaded Crete from the direction of Macedonia and Illyria. Moreover, he discovered that Albanians, Montenegrins and Sfakians shared many similarities in stature, appearance, language, national costume, belligerent tendencies, tribal orders, and vendettas.
[edit] Recent research
The Races of Europe was not the only attempt to develop a system of classification among European types. There was also Joseph Deniker's theory, and Burtil Lundman's theory which is described in the book The Races And Peoples Of Europe.
Some recent evidence has suggested both that Neanderthals were much closer to modern humans genetically, and that there may have been some interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.[5]
Late 20th century and early 21st century population genetics refute many of Coon's fundamental racial theories, but also provide support to some of his classifications. The mitochondrial haplogroup distribution confirms Coon's belief that many people in the vicinity of Europe, particularly the northern and northeast coasts of Africa, and the Middle East, are related to Europeans. Also, there is the R1 haplogroup that originates with Basques in the west (the R1b haplogroup) and Kurgans in the east (the R1a haplogroup), both of which are Mediterranean-Nordic types, as contrasted with the types that Coon believes to be paleolithic, which are related to the origin of the I haplogroup. [6]
[edit] References
- ^ William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899), p.1
- ^ Thomas C. Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective': Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era" Historical of Political Economy 35:4 (2003): 687-712, discussion of Ripley's work on p. 690. Available online at http://www.princeton.edu/~sbwhite/eugenicsC.pdf.
- ^ Matthew Press Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Jonathan P. Spiro, "Patrician racist: The evolution of Madison Grant" (Ph. D. diss., Dept. of History, University of California, Berkeley, 2000).
- ^ Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1962), pp. vii and ix.
- ^ There is a little Neanderthal in a lot of us
- ^ http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mcdonald/WorldHaplogroupsMaps.pdf 1 2 3 4
