The Races of Europe is the title of two books related to the anthropology of Europeans. The first book was written by American sociologist/anthropologist William Z. Ripley in 1899, and was positively received by both the scientific and lay community. Harvard anthropologist Carleton Stevens Coon published a new, completely rewritten edition of the book in 1939. Both books wrote a history and classification of white racial types, and draw most of their conclusions about race from morphological observation and anthropometric studies of individuals. Some of Coon's racial descriptions or theories regarding language have fallen out of favour with mainstream anthropology because genetics are now the defining features of racial clusterings.

[edit] The Races of Europe (1899)

Ripley's map of cephalic index in Europe, from The Races of Europe (1899).

William Z. Ripley published The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study in 1899, which grew out of a series of lectures he gave at the Lowell Institute at Columbia in 1896. Ripley believed that race was critical to understanding human history, though his work 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 descended collaterally, along the lines of purely mental suggestion by virtue of mere social contact with preceding generations."^[1]

Ripley's book, written to help finance his children's education, became very-well respected in 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. From this and other socio-geographical factors, Ripley classified Europeans into three distinct races:

1. Teutonic/Nordic — members of the northern race were long-skulled (or dolichocephalic), tall in stature, and possessed pale eyes and skin.
2. Mediterranean — members of the southern race were long-skulled (or dolichocephalic), short in stature, and possessed dark eyes and skin.
3. 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 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:

1. The Caucasoid race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of sapiens and neanderthals) types and Mediterranean (purely sapiens) types.
2. The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
3. Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic and settled there.
4. The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
5. When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, there occurs the process of "dinarization" which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features, epitomized by the Dinaric race.
6. The Caucasoid race extends well beyond Europe into the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and Northeast Africa.^[5]
7. The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock being a mixture of Corded ware and Danubian Mediterraneans.

[edit] Illyrians as Dorians

Carleton S. Coon claimed that there was 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 a 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 stated that Albanians, Montenegrins and Sfakians shared many similarities in stature, appearance, language, national costume, belligerent tendencies, tribal orders and vendettas.

[edit] Other research

Deniker's "Races de l'Europe" from 1899, including la race nordique.

The Races of Europe was by no means the only attempt to develop a system of classification among European types. It was preceded by Joseph Deniker's theory.

In Germany, Hans F. K. Günther created an alternative taxonomic model. Bertil Lundman also produced an alternative model in the book The Races And Peoples Of Europe. Some recent evidence has suggested that there may have been some interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.^[6]

The mainstream view in modern anthropology is that all humans are direct descendants of a population that evolved in Africa and expanded from there to acquire predominant traits locally, but that gene flow was not interrupted on a scale large enough to recognize anything but clines.

[edit] See also

• The Races And Peoples Of Europe

[edit] References