The evidence for the racial composition of the early Finns is scanty, but incapable of misinterpretation. One small series of ten skulls dating from about the sixth century B.C., contemporaneous with the Early Scythian period, has been identified with the ancestors of the Volga Finns at the time of their unity. (See Appendix 1, cot. 49.) These come from the cemeteries of Polianki and Maklacheievka, from the former Viatka government in Permian Finn country just south of the present Komi or Zyryenian Republic. The graves belonged to the so-called Anan'ino cultural horizon. This Anan'ino culture was formed from a combination of influences from Siberia, the Caucasus, Scythia, and Scandinavia. It did not end suddenly, but passed by a gradual process of evolution into the civilization of the historic Volga Finns. Therefore, we may consider these skulls, few as they are, to represent the ancestors of the Finns before the beginning of their historic expansion.
This small group of seven male and three female crania is not completely homogeneous, but it is nearly so. All of the skulls are European in racial type. The faces are a little broader than in most Mediterranean groups, but not to an exceptional degree. The noses, with the exception of one extremely leptorrhine male, are mesorrhine or chamaerrhine; but so are those of many early Danubians. The cranial form is mesocephalic or dolichocephalic, with one male reaching the figure of 83; the vault is moderately high; the forehead usually straight, the browridges moderate.
There is nothing new about these crania, and nothing specifically mongoloid. They closely resemble another small series of eight male skulls from the cemetery of Polom in the same district as the Anan'ino cemeteries6 (see Appendix I, cot. 50), dating from the ninth century A.D., and known to have been those of Finns of the Permian sub-family. In view of the small numbers, no difference can be found which would be statistically valid. A third group from the Lower Volga, representing the Mordvins of the fourteenth century, is similar to the Anan'ino and Permian crania, except that it is extremely long headed, with low indices, centered about the range from 71 to 73.
When we make a metrical comparison between the first two groups of Finnish skulls and all European series previously studied, the find that they fit into the ranks of Iron Age Indo-European speakers without difficulty. On the whole, they resemble most nearly the larger-sized members of the intermediate group; they also resemble the Scythian crania to a considerable extent, and even more the Minussinsk skulls. They arc slightly smaller than the Germanic type, but equal to it in vault height and face breadth. In nose form and cranial height, they resemble the Neolithic Danubians.
News of the racial position of these early Finnish skulls will come as a surprise to scholars who see in the Finns a group of mongoloid immigrants from Asia. But that they were essentially if not wholly European is, despite the paucity of Debetz's material, incontestable. Nor can one derive these Finns from forest-dwellers of Mesolithic tradition, except perhaps as a minor influence. Furthermore, in the early Anan'ino series, recognizable Corded peculiarities are to he found in but one male skull out of seven.
The Finno-Ugrians, therefore, may be tentatively considered to have been, in the period before they expanded into their historic scats, Europeans of mixed origin, basically Danubian in type, with some brachycephalic element and an extremely long-headed variation as well; the latter is already familiar to us in the form of the Corded type; the former is not clearly definable, but is European. Its only discernible difference from the others in the same series is in a greater breadth of the skull. This broad-headed element is completely lacking in the late lower Volga group, of which we have only the cranial indices.
Debetz's discovery that the Finno-Ugrian speakers were originally purely European in race, and furthermore, not local Palaeolithic or Mesolithic survivors, is in perfect accord with the present state of linguistic knowledge, which makes their form of speech one of two equally weighted elements in the basic Indo-European. They not only were, but on logical grounds must have been, in the larger sense, Mediterraneans. (*)
(TRoE, chapter VII, section 2)
*Note: Mediterranean here is only used in its widest sense, i.e. including Nordic types.
Why are Finns blonde?
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