The conclusions to this chapter have been partly anticipated in the introduction; an elaborate résumé is unnecessary here. There are, however, several matters which have been brought to light by the survey which has just been completed, and which were not fully anticipated.

In the first place, the geographical extent of the Alpine racial type is enormous, reaching from France to China. Throughout this extent it maintains a nearly constant form, in stature, in the dimensions of the head and face, in pilosity, and in general morphological features. Its wide milieu suggests that its presence in Europe is merely an extension of its original range, for it could not have gone from Europe to Turkestan. If, as has been assumed for the purposes of this book, it was originally a part of the Upper Palaeolithic hunters of Late Pleistocene Europe and North Africa, then the former spatial extent of the cultures in which these hunters participated must reach far into Asia.

The same forces, furthermore, which derived the Alpine from the larger-bodied and less infantile Upper Palaeolithic group as a whole must have operated across the entire zone now occupied by Alpines. The consistency of the Alpines in this zone is clear; what is more difficult to explain than this consistency is the failure of the northwestern European relatives of the Alpines to undergo a similar reduction. The difference in pigmentation between various Alpine groups, and between Alpines and the unreduced Palaeolithic survivors, is of little importance; we have seen that the white racial stock is extraordinarily fluid in regard to pigment changes.

The second phenomenon revealed by our study is the fact that when Mediterranean racial types are blended in a two to one proportion with Alpines, something totally different from either results, and this product is not in all characters intermediate. The facial breadths are Mediterranean, the nose and face are often elongated, the cranial length reduced to an Alpine dimension, and the breadth similarly increased; at the same time the foramen magnum and the auricular passages retain a metrical position in reference to the anterior landmarks of the cranial and facial skeleton found in the Mediterranean ancestor. The occipital region undergoes a certain degree of flattening, and the nasal bridge, in harmony with this motivation from the rear, becomes prominent. The process described above is one of Dinaricization, and the hybrid types produced by this principle are Dinarics and Armenoids.

There are more Dinarics and Armenoids in the world than there are Alpines; this is due to historical reasons. When the food producers entered the territory formerly occupied by Upper Palaeolithic hunters, the former were much more numerous than the latter, who either retired to environmental pockets economically unfavorable to the food producers, or were absorbed into the ethnic corpus of the latter. The adjustment of the earlier population element to the new conditions and their reëmergence through the Mediterranean group made a combination of the two basic racial elements in a genetic sense necessary. Thus the majority of Europeans are actually permanently blended, secondary hybrids between the old and the new; pure Mediterranean populations and individuals who are purely Mediterranean from the genetic as well as the anthropometric standpoint, are to be found only outside of Europe, except for the Iberian peninsula and the western Mediterranean islands. At the same time and in the same strict sense pure pper Palaeolithic survivors, themselves initially hybrids, are probably not to be found at all in Europe, although many individuals who may recapitulate Upper Palaeolithic man of different varieties, with considerable fidelity, are to be seen.

This survey of the living Europeans which we have just finished simplifies the whole white racial problem enormously; it reduces the white race to two least common denominators, the Mediterranean and the Upper Palaeolithic group, which in turn means Mediterranean and Mediterranean-Neanderthaloid in the widest sense. This simplification must not be accepted without caution; the Neanderthaloid hybrid hypothesis seems most reasonable in view of present evidence, but that evidence, while clear in implication, is small in quantity. Furthermore this simplification, if tentatively accepted, must not be overworked. The two basic stocks which it postulates are each enormously varied and the white races and sub-races which have resulted from their conjunction are also numerous. Without a wholesale judgment of Solomon all whites cannot be divided simply into two groups, any more than they could, in accordance with Ripley's simplification, into three.