Although the Pleistocene men are long dead, and factory workers scurry to their labors where the Magdalenian hunters once impounded reindeer, the problems of human racial origins, and of human development during the Pleistocene, are still of great importance. On the foundations of our knowledge of Pleistocene man, in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, must be built the interpretation of later and more complicated racial movements, racial survivals, genetic continuities and genetic changes. For this reason it seems better advised to state without trepidation the reconstructon of Pleistiocene racial events which the facts themselves suggest, than to defer to more cautious and perhaps wiser opinions.

These conclusions, which are by no means novel, ⁷¹ may be stated briefly:

(1) Homo sapiens was fully evolved as early as the mid-Pleistocene, if not earlier.

(2) The earliest Homo sapiens known, as represented by several examples from Europe and Africa, was an ancestral long-headed white man of short stature and moderately great brain size.

(3) The negro group probably evolved parallel to this white strain, from a related sapiens ancestor. At what point the ancestors of negroes and whites diverged is not known.

(4) During the Middle Pleistocene, if not at other times as well, a mixture took place between early white dolichocephals and one or more non-sapiens hominid species, including Homo neanderthalensis.

(5) The result of this mixture was the development of a reasonably stable hybrid race, which was characterized by an excess of size, both of brain case and of bodily bulk. Although differing metrically from the rest if Homo sapiens as a whole, its character was nevertheless mainly sapiens, and only to a small extent Neanderthaloid or non-sapiens. Within the sapiens species, its relationship was with the whites.

(6) This predominantly sapiens character may have been partly the result of convergent evolutionary tendencies on the part of the non-sapiens ancestor.

(7) Modern white men must include both individuals and racial entities which respectively possess and lack this non-sapiens strain, since all branches of the white stock did not mix with it.

(8) On the basis of Palaeolithic cultural phenomena, one cannot assume that the non-sapiens element absorbed through mixture was less intelligent, or, in the social and intellectual sense, less human, than the original sapiens species. Modern European races which possess the former element show no signs of intellectual inferiority, or of any other discernible mental differences.

(9) Most if not all of the basic variations of bodily and cranial form, including brachycephaly, which occur among white men, already existed during the Late Pleistocene. The materials for the differentiation of white races and sub-races in post-glacial times were all present.

Notes:

71. Aichel, Marett, and most recently Krogman, take stands essentially similar to the following.
Aichel, O., Der deutsche Mensch, pp. 12-36.
Marett, J. R. de la H., Race, Sex, and Environment.
Krogman, W. M., "Cranial types from Alishar Hüyük," in H. H. von der Osten, The Alishar Hüyük, Oriental Institute Publication #30, part IV, pp. 213-293.