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THE NORTH

305

the sparseness of body hair, the small genitals, the bulbous forehead with a smooth supraorbital region, the weak chin, and the low, child-like nose.22 Some environmental mechanism working upon the mineral economy of this peripheral human group has probably produced this size reduction and infantilism.23

Schreiner’s opinion, based upon a detailed study of Lapp craniology as well as upon the living material, is simple and adequate. Translated into the terms of the present study, it signifies that the original ancestral Lapps represented a stage in the evolution of both the Upper Palaeolithic Europeans and the mongoloids, and that while the mongoloids have specialized in their own characteristic way, and while the Ice-Age Euro­pean strain was modified by mixture with and virtual absorption by the encroaching post-Pleistocene food producers, the ancestral Lapps were, in their turn, modified largely by a general size reduction and an increas­ing infantilism. The jaw reduction of the Lapps is their most easily iden­tified specialization.

In view of the known history of Upper Palaeolithic whites and of mon­goloids, this divergence of the Lapps from the others must have taken place as early as the Laufen glacial retreat. Their area of specialization was presumably western Siberia, where they found room in which to specialize with little interference. From here they must later have spread over Finland and northwestern Russia, whence they entered northern Scandinavia sometime during the first millennium of the Christian era, by a gradual trickling process. In their northern wanderings they may have met the Samoyed, and from them acquired their domestic reindeer and the habit of reindeer milking. Since, according to both Laufer and Hatt,24 this last trait did not develop in its central Asiatic home much before the middle of the first millennium B.C., the Lapps could not have acquired this practice much before their arrival in Scandinavia. The acquisition of this superior economy must have given them an impetus for northward ex­pansion, as it did, farther east, with the* Tungus.

We must not look for Lappish ancestors, therefore, in the large-headed Borreby people of Mesolithic and Neolithic Denmark, nor in the occu­pants of the Stone Age sites of northernmost Norway; if we find Lapp-like

  1. This general estimate of the Lapp racial position is for the most part a paraphrase of K. E. Schreiner’s conclusions in his Zur Osteologie der Lappen, by far the most erudite work yet to appear on the Lapp question.

  2. Gjessing, r., Die Kautokeinolappen, pp. 90-95.

Marett, J. R. de la H., Race, Sex, and Environment.

  1. Hatt, g., Notes on Reindeer Nomadism, maaa, vol. 6, 1919. This is one of the few points regarding the history of reindeer husbandry upon which these two authorities agree.

Laufer, B., The Reindeer and Its Domestication, MAAA, vol. 4, #2, 1917; AA, vol. 22, 1920, pp. 192-197.

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THE RACES OF EUROPE

physical traits, as do Czekanowski, Mydlarski, and others, among eastern European brachycephals, and even among western European Alpines, we must remember that some of the Lappish peculiarities, including perhaps their specialized nasal tip form, may have been common posses­sions of the Upper Palaeolithic European peoples as well. As we shall see later, there may have been transitional forms between Lapps and Euro­peans, and this general class of humanity may be responsible for the wide- eyed brachycephals who, as we saw in our historical chapters, appeared now and then in southern Russia and Poland from the beginning of the Neolithic onward.

  1. The samoyeds26

In the eastern extension of their territory the Lapps share the Kola Peninsula with their neighbors and fellow reindeer-herders, the Samoyeds. The Lapps represent, however, a much older population, for the Samoyeds have only lived there for a few centuries. There are, according to Russian authorities, only 1,6,500 Samoyeds in the world; of these 4000 live on the Kola Peninsula, another 5000 range between the White Sea and the mouth of the Yenisei River, and the rest hunt between the Obi and Yenisei rivers, and in the Yenisei drainage. Thus the bulk of the Sam­oyeds still inhabit their Siberian home. All of those mentioned speak a language which constitutes one of the two primary divisions of Uralic speech. It seems to be definitely related to Finno-Ugrian, although its supposed kinship to Tungus, Mongol, and Turkish has been questioned.

Other Samoyeds, who have been Turkicized in language, and to a large extent in manner of living, dwell in southern Siberia, in the provinces of Yeniseisk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk, and also in Mongolia. These go under the names of Soyots, Karagas, and Uriankhai; they are more numerous than the Samoyeds proper. Whatever their earlier history, the Samoyeds, without reasonable doubt, may be considered to have developed as an ethnic and linguistic group in the region north of the Altai Mountains, the general center of Altaic-speaking Mongoloids.26 Their spread north­ward into Siberia and thence to the Arctic rim of Europe must have been a relatively recent phenomenon.

In central Asia the Turkicized Samoyeds are definitely and fully mongoloid, and belong to the Buryat-Mongol variety, which we have encountered historically among the Avars. Those who live in Europe have brought the same physical type with them with but little modification.

26 Non-anthropometric data mostly from Jochelson, W., Peoples of Asiatic Russia; and from Les Voyages du Professeur Pallas.

  1. Professor G. J. Ramstedt of Helsingfors University has expressed the opinion that the original bearers of Samoyedic speech must at one time have moved to the Altai region from a point nearer the Finno-Ugrian homeland.—Private Communication.

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