The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant

Author:Madison Grant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2017-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter IV THE ALPINE RACE

THE Alpine race is clearly of Eastern and Asiatic origin. It forms the westernmost extension of a widespread subspecies which, outside of Europe, occupies Asia Minor, Iran, the Pamirs, and the Hindu Kush. In fact the western Himalayas were probably its centre of original evolution and radiation, and its Asiatic members constitute a distinct subdivision, the Armenoids.

The Alpine race is distinguished by a round face and correspondingly round skull which in the true Armenians has a peculiar, sugarloaf shape, a character which can be easily recognized. The Alpines must not be confounded with the sliteyed Mongols who centre around Thibet and the steppes of north Asia. The fact that both these races are round skulled does not involve identity of origin any more than the long skulls of the Nordics and of the Mediterraneans require that they be both considered of the same subspecies, although good anthropologists have been misled by this parallelism. The Alpines are of stocky build and moderately short stature, except where they have been crossed with Nordic elements. This race is also characterized by dark hair, tending to a dark brown color, and in Europe at the present time the eye is usually dark but sometimes grayish. The ancestral Proto-Alpines from the highlands of western Asia must, of course, have had brunet eyes, and very dark, probably black, hair. Whether we are justified in considering gray eyes peculiar to populations of mixed Alpine and Nordic blood is difficult to determine, but one thing is certain, the combination of blue eyes and flaxen hair is never Alpine.

The European Alpines retain very little of their Asiatic origin, except the skull, and have been in contact with the Nordic race so long that in central and western Europe they are everywhere saturated with the blood of that race. Many populations now considered good Germans, such as the majority of the Wurtembergers, Bavarians, Austrians Swiss, and Tyrolese, are merely Teutonized Alpines.

The first appearance in Europe of the Alpines, dates from the Azilian Period when it is represented by the Furfooz-Grenelle race. There were, later, several invasions of this race which entered Europe during Neolithic times from the Asia Minor plateaux, by way of the Balkans and the valley of the Danube. It appears also to have passed north of the Black Sea, as some slight traces have been discovered there of round skulls which long antedate the existing population, but the Russian brachycephaly of today is of much later origin.

This race in its final expansion far to the northwest, ultimately reached Norway, Denmark, and Holland, and planted among the dolichocephalic natives small colonies of round skulls, which still exist. When this invasion reached the extreme northwest of Europe its energy was spent, and the invaders were soon forced back into central Europe by the Nordics. The Alpines at this time of maximum extension, about 1800 B.C., crossed into Britain, and a few reached Ireland and introduced bronze into both these islands. As the metal appears about

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