(Chapter IX, section 13)

 

Conclusions




The systematic study of the living peoples of the northern regions of Europe, by geographic, ethnic, and linguistic groups, has led to the following conclusions:

(1) This zone still shelters various groups of Upper Palaeolithic survivors. These include both reduced and unreduced varieties. The former includes the Lapps, whose home was formerly in the region of the Ural Mountains, and the Ladogan type of the eastern forest, which has blended with Danubian descendants to form a type known as Neo-Danubian. The latter includes full-sized descendants of the Brünn-type men of the Aurignacian, blended into the coastal population of Norway and into the Icelandic racial body; it also includes brachycephalic Borreby descendants in Norway, Denmark, and elsewhere.

(2) The eastern valley region of Norway, along with the Swedish plain, forms an area of maximum survival of the Iron Age Nordic race of central Europe.

(3) The East Baltic race in the strict sense is to be distinguished from the Neo-Danubian; it is concentrated in the eastern Baltic countries only and consists of a blend of unreduced Upper Palaeolithic survivors with Corded people and with Neo-Danubians.

(4) Completely evolved mongoloids live on European soil, on the rim of the Arctic Ocean. These mongoloids are the Samoyeds, whose spread westward and northward from central Asia has been recent. Neither the Lapps nor the Ladogan derivatives are or have ever been fully mongoloid, but they have evolved a certain distance in a mongoloid direction. There is nothing specifically mongoloid about the Brünn or Borreby types, the unreduced Upper Palaeolithic survivors.

Except for the Lapps, none of the racial types mentioned is confined to regions studied in this chapter. We shall encounter all of the others elsewhere.