THE RACES OF EUROPE

we are confronted again with a division between Palaeolithic survivors, and the descendants of the farthest wandering of Mediterranean food- producers. From the standpoint of environmental conditioning in its effect upon the human form, we have reached an area of maximum differentiation. Northern Europe, especially northwestern Europe, has served not only as a refuge area for archaic humanity, but also as a source from which migrations of vast compass have spread southward into warmer lands at times of environmental distress. Emigrants forced out by the vagaries of its treacherous climate have not only affected in varying measure the rest of Europe, but have likewise played a principal part in the peopling of the New World.

2. The lapps

If the white race spreads far beyond the arbitrary boundaries of the European continent to the south and east, the opposite may be said of the north. In the circumpolar zone which fringes the Arctic Sea, Asia encroaches upon Europe, and except for Iceland, the racial uniformity of this frigid ring is, superficially at least, complete. In a far less super­ficial sense, is the cultural uniformity valid. From Greenland to Lapland one finds short, lank-haired people driving across the frozen tundra in bone-shod sleds, drawn by dog or reindeer; these hyperboreans dress themselves in warmly tailored fur garments, with trousers for both sexes alike; they live in conical huts of birch bark, or domes of rock and sod; they venerate the bear and witness the supernatural spirit flights and ventriloquistic conversations of their shamans.

With few exceptions they are all short in stature, and this shortness reaches its extreme at the two ends of the circumpolar zone, Greenland and Lappland. This shortness is accentuated in all of the circumpolar groups by a relative reduction in leg length, with a greater trunk height. The same reduction in length, probably produced by the same mechanism, has been noted in the case of the Magdalenian hunters in late glacial times. These same Magdalenians, notably Chancelade and the male Obercassel, showed at the same time an incipient degree of mongoloid adaptation, insofar as this adaptation is visible in the skull and especially the facial skeleton. It is likely that the occurrence of partial mongoloid traits in many Upper Palaeolithic survivor groups may be due to the retention of traits acquired during the final glacial maximum. In the same way all of the circumpolar groups show, in one degree or another, a certain amount of mongoloidism, and it is possible that the mongoloid stock as a whole represents a progressive mutation from a proto-white stock, of Upper Palaeolithic variety, which began in the Late Pleistocene and reached various degrees of specialization in post-glacial times.