THE RACES OF MANKIND
If all the races of mankind have descended from a common stock originating at a single center, their differentiation and dispersion over the entire world must have taken place over an enormous period of time and to speculate about it would be quite futile. It would indeed be easier to believe that Man was actually evolved in several regions instead of one but for the fact that the races cannot be distinguished as species since the human cross-breed is not, as are hybrids, sterile. Man, from the time at least when he became a hunter using weapons to kill--since without them he must have been a very inefficient slayer--was migratory, living in communities, groups of associates, which moved perpetually in search of fresh hunting-grounds, only occasionally localizing themselves where the conditions were peculiarly favorable and no stronger community was moving upon their track. When Man became a herdsman as well as a hunter, a tamer as well as a slayer of animals, he continued on his migratory path, seeking fresh pastures. When he began to be a cultivator, his nomadic instincts were held in check; when a little labor in cultivation was richly repaid, a community capable of holding his own against attack was inclined to remain permanently settled.
By these ceaseless migrations, extending over many thousands of years, the whole globe was gradually peopled. When the dispersion began or whence it started can only be guessed with more or less plausibility. Hereditary characteristics began to develop, which grew into distinctive racial attributes; and long before history began the populations of the world might probably have been distinguished into four main divisions, each having certain persistent characteristics sufficient to justify us in referring to them as races : the American; the Mongolian, whose main habitat is Eastern and Central Asia; the African, mainly in Africa; and the fourth, most conveniently labelled Caucasian, occupying Western Asia, Europe, North-East Africa, including Abyssinia and Egypt, and the Mediterranean littoral of Africa. Not improbably the American is an offshoot of the Mongolian. African and Caucasian strains are to be detected in parts of the Mongolian area, Mongolians (Hottentots) in South Africa, Mongolians (Finns and Lapps) in Europe, apart from Mongolian immigrants within the historic period. As to India, the proportion of African, Mongolian, and Caucasian is matter of apparently hopeless controversy, of theories diametrically contradictory, save that the pure African is certainly not to be found there.
Of the four groups, the Caucasian is the subject of most controversy, owing to the marked differences of the types which it includes. We are on tolerably safe ground in distinguishing a Hamitic or African section, and a Semitic or Asiatic section. But Europe gives a complex which has by no means been disentangled, for it embraces not less than three distinct physical types. One is, roughly speaking, prevalent in the north of Europe, fair "dolichocephalic"-- that is, long-headed, long from back to front of the cranium in proportion to its width; another, dark and dolichocephalic, prevalent among all the peoples about the Mediterranean; the third, mainly (but by no means exclusively) in South-Central and Eastern Europe, "brachycephalic"-- that is, short or round-headed, short from back to front of the cranium in proportion to its breadth. These, since the Mongolian is brachycephalic, are sometimes classed as Mongolian.
There is at least a strong presumption that the dark long-heads were closely akin to the Hamites of the Caucasian branch. Possibly the northern fair long-heads were of the same original stock. The short-heads, unless they were immigrants, must have been differentiated from them at a very remote period indeed. But, in any case, the greater part of Europe was occupied by the tribes of one or other of the three great divisions, or by composite tribes, before Europe began to have a history, before the "Aryan" made his appearance.
Who were the Aryans? Whence did they come? Volumes, libraries have been written on the subject. Probably they were originally a section of the Caucasian group who, in at least comparative isolation, developed a language which not much less than three thousand years ago had in one form or another dominated every European language, and some others as well. Peoples speaking an Aryan tongue--languages that is, which all beyond doubt had a common origin and differed essentially from the tongues of Hamitic, Semitic, or South European Caucasians, as well as from all non-Caucasian tongues--did between 2000 and 3000 B.C. (approximately) penetrate practically the whole of Europe, and also into Persia and over the mountains of the Hindu Kush into India.
The Aryan tongue then was spread abroad by successive migration of Aryan-speaking groups, each migration carrying with it some variant of the Proto-Aryan language--Indo-Aryan, Iranian (Persian), Hellenic, Italian, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic--and in a lesser degree common institutions presumably derived from a common source. Hellenic-speaking groups overran what we now call Greece; speakers of Latin and the kindred Oscan overran Italy; tribes of Celtic speech overran Western Europe, including the British Isles; Teutonic speech was carried over Scandinavia. But racially, for the most part, populations were not displaced; they absorbed more than they were absorbed by the newcomers, who only leavened the mass; they remained substantially what they had been before. Hence both Teutons and Celts included both round-headed and long-headed groups, racially distinct. Homer's "fair-haired Achaeans" were absorbed into the dark-haired Greeks. The Caucasian race-element in India was unquestionably small, though the Indo-Aryan language and tradition predominated; and if the western Slav is predominantly Caucasian, the eastern is predominatly Mongolian. Thus the generic name Aryan and the specific names Teutonic, Celtic, and the rest, became all in effect linguistic appellations significant only in a very slight degree of common racial origin, though the first appearance everywhere of the Aryan--that is, of organized communities speaking in Aryan tongue--is of the highest importance.
But the Aryan does not come on the stage at all in the earliest scenes of history. With the single exception of the Mongolian Akkadians, the first actors are all Hamitic or Semitic Caucasians.