8
The Northwestern, Nordic-Mediterranean, and Keltic types.
ARTICLE I. - The Northwestern type.
In 1939, in The Races of Europe, Coon termed the Borreby, the Brunn, and the Tronder as being Upper-Paleolithic survivors. He later did away with this system and adopted Deniker's and Hooton's scheme. Hooton, a brilliant man, was the quasi-mentor of Coon. Hooton responded to and educated Coon.
Hooton wrote:
Coon realized the errors in his Upper-Paleolithic claims and adopted Deniker's type, called the "North-Western", and placed the Brunn and Upper-Paleolithic survivors under that category. According to Deniker, the North-Western was a subtype of the Atlanto-Mediterranean, and a piece of the Northwestern European puzzle.Carleton S. Coon's Preview of the Data of this Survey
THE preliminary data of this survey were made available to Professor Carleton S. Coon for use in his work, "The Races of Europe"(Coon, 1939, pp 376-84). Dr. Coon's summary of the material presented in detail here will be found, by anyone who takes the trouble to check his figures with ours, to differ insignificantly in some of the means and percentages quoted, because Coon used the results of our first statistical run which was superseded by a completely new statistical analysis when some of the data had been found incorrectly sorted in respect of the county groupings. However, the Coon preview is substantially correct and is, in our opinion an excellent summary. It is Coon's interpretations that we wish to discuss here.
His conclusions are most conveniently embodied in the following quotations:
In stature and in sagittal dimensions of the head and face, the composite Irishman might well be considered a Nordic in the Iron Age sense, of the Hallstatt variety as represented of living inhabitants of eastern Norway, or even of the Keltic Iron Age variety as represented by abundant skeletal series from England. But in total bulk and in lateral diameters, he exceeds any known Nordic form, and in fact cannot be considered an unmixed descendant of the greater Mediterranean family of races. He is comparable in these respects to western Norwegians, to the Livs, and to some of the Finns. In order to explain his metrical character, it is necessary to invoke the mass absorption by either Mesolithic Atlanto-Mediterraneans, or Iron Age Nordics, or both, of an earlier Upper Paleolithic strain, which entered Ireland in a Mesolithic cultural tradition. The living composite Irishman is not a pure Cromagnon or Brunn-Predmost man, but it would be no exaggeration to say that, from a metrical standpoint, at least half of his genetic ancestry is to be derived from such a source. Since the number of Mesolithic cultural survivors must have been quite small in proportion to that of the later invaders of Ireland, we are faced with a not uncommon situation, in which an older racial element has, by differential breeding rates, reemerged(Coon, 1939, p. 378).
....the Irish people represent a blend of two principal racial groups, (a) the survivors of the unreduced Upper Paleolithic people of northwestern Europe, in a mesocephalic or sub-brachycephalic form, and (b) a Keltic Iron Age Nordic. The other two factors, (c) the tall, long-headed Mediterranean form brought by the Megalithic invaders, and (d) the Dinaric introduced during the Bronze Age, have both been submerged by the earliest and latest population waves.
The Upper Paleolithic people are concentrated in southwestern Ireland, especially in Kerry and Cork; just in the part of Ireland from which the Irish in America are mostly derived. The Iron Age element is concentrated in the eastern counties and in the fertile Great Plain region of central Ireland; what other Nordic elements are found also in the east, and the latter is particularly common among members of the Protestant landlord class (Coon, 1939, p. 3830.
The principal point at issue is Coon's hypothesis of the "survival" or "reemergence of Upper Paleolithic" types, which is his favorite theme and explanation of the occurance of tall, rugged dolicocephals and brachycephals in northwestern Europe. There is, it seems to us, no a priori objection to identifying or designating certain contemporary crania as of "Upper Paleolithic" type, providing that they do, in fact, more closely resemble Upper Paleolithic skulls metrically and morphologically than they resemble other crania of later archaeological provenience. It is a much more precarious business to select living individuals, whose crania are clothed with flesh and other soft parts, as representing Upper Paleolithic types, since, without and X-ray eye, it is very difficult to discern many important morphological details of the cranium, to say nothing of the fact that comparatively little of the detail of eyes, nose, ears, lips can be deduced from a study of the skull and absolutely nothing at all relative to pigmentation and among and character of hair. Hence, if we designate certain living types as "Upper Paleolithic survivors" we are not on solid grounds as to their cranial features and have no ground at all to stand upon as respects their resemblance to men of the Paleolithic in soft parts of the head and face. Nevertheless, in spite pf these objections, it is by no means improbable that some rugged, primitive-looking contemporary men are replicas of their Upper Paleolithic ancestors and it is not wholly objectionable and indefensible to designate them tentatively by names suggesting such resemblance.
However, the implication that such contemporary "Upper Paleolithic" types represent actual straight line descendants of genetically isolated Paleolithic stocks is very difficult to accept anywhere, and especially in a region so thoroughly overrun by successive streams of invaders and colonizers as has been the case in Western Europe and even in Ireland, its jumping-off place.
Again, although there is considerable skeletal and other evidence that suggests that a certain process of slenderizing and refinement has commonly taken place in Homo sapiens since the close of the Ice Age, tending to produce human types with less massive skeletal structure and of generally more gracile form; it is hardly reasonable to designate all of the rugged, heavy-boned men as "Paleolithic survivors" and to relegate all of the less sturdy to other categories which have putatively undergone "reduction". We cannot be sure that the entire recent trend of evolution of Homo sapiens has been consistently in the same direction. It is wholly possible that high-statured, heavy-boned massive types have emerged in certain areas as a result of diet and other environmental conditions, hybridization and heterosis, or other causes quite removed from having preserved unbroken types of their Paleolithic ancestors. Of course, all of us must have had Paleolithic ancestors and probably some of them were runts and some giants.
In the case of the Irish, it seems to us unsafe to conclude that because they are tall and have big heads, they are necessarily derived in large measure from putative Mesolithic settlers of "Upper Paleolithic" types. In the first place we have no skeletal remains that can be attributed with certainty to these Mesolithic settlers and consequently we do not know that they were of the "Brunn" and the "Borreby" types. In the second place there is no evidence of a Mesolithic culture in Kerry and Cork, or anywhere in western Ireland, where Dr. Coon identifies as living types as particularly little modified "Paleolithic survivors." To suppose that these massive physically superior western Irish types were necessarily the earliest in Ireland and were banished to the farthest and least desiring quarters of the island by physically inferior invaders who knew how to polish stone is a somewhat gratuitous assumption. Actually, we are far more certain that the Bronze Age or Beaker types of men who invaded Great Britain and Ireland, were tall, heavy-boned, and generally rugged, than we are of such characteristics of Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic inhabitants of the British Isles. Of course, we can argue that the Bronze Age invaders are themselves "Paleolithic survivors," but that gets us nowhere.
One of the principal difficulties encountered by the student who attempts to use Coon's racial classification of whites is his failure to define clearly the pigmental characteristics of the racial or sunracial types that he distinguishes. This is apparently a consequence of his attempt to base his classifications primarily upon the cranial forms of archaeological specimens of which the pigmental associations are naturally unknown. Coon recognizes "Large-headed Paleolithic survivors"-- the dolicocephalic brunn and the brachycephalic Borreby; "Pure and Mixed Paleolithic and Mesolithic Survivors of Moderate Head Size"--mostly brachycephals and including Alpines, "Ladogans"(divided into Neo-Danubians and East Baltic) and Lapps(Coon, 1939, pp. 291-92). This second group of "survivors" is supposed to be somewhat "reduced" in head size, and, in the case of the Alpines, "foetalized." His third group comprises of "Pure" and Mixed Unbrachycephalized Mediterraneans Derivatives." Under this are included a general group, "Mediterraneans," with the following subtypes: (a) Mediterranean proper - defined merely as short-statured, dolichocephalic and mesocephalic, (b) Atlanto-Mediterraneans - described as tall, straight-nosed and markedly dolichocephalic, and (c) Irano-Afghans - long-faced, high-headed, hook-nosed, usually of tall stature. The second group, Nordics, is divided into 4 living varieties: (a) Keltic Iron Age type, described as mesocephalic and low-vaulted with a prominent nose; (b) Anglo-Saxon type -"heavy-boned and rather high-headed"; (c) Trondelagen type - stated to be a hybrid type; (d) Osterdal type - "the original Hallstatt Nordic, smaller-headed and finer-boned" than the two previous Nordic types enumerated.
Finally Coon has a group of "brachycephalized Mediterranean Derivatives, probably Mixed." It includes (1) Dinarics - "a tall brachycephalic type of intermediate pigmentation, usually planoccipital, and showing the facial and nasal prominence of Near Eastern peoples"; (2) Armenoids - a similar type to the above, but with larger face and nose, usually brunet pigmentation and well developed pilous system; (3) Noric - "a blond, planocciptal brachycephalic."
All of these types are described in greater detail in the sections of Coon's work on the various parts of Europe where they occur. Apparently Coon's primary criteria of classification are absolute head size and the cranial index, together with massiveness of gracility of the cranial, facial, and postcranial skeleton. Of lesser importance in his scheme are stature and the form of the nose and face. The importance of hair color, eye color, and skin color is still less. It is implied that all of the varieties of Mediterranean are brunet, and of Nordic blond, but we are unable to deduce from his work whether a blue-eyed dark-haired dolicocephal should be classified as "Atlanto-Mediterranean" or "Keltic Iron Age." We think that Coon would include most of our "Keltic" type under his Atlanto-Mediterranean class, but those medium brown hair under his Keltic Iron Age type which was a subdivision of Nordic. Coon did not utilize our sorted types, since, of course, they do not conform to his scheme of classification. This difference in classification makes it very difficult for us to compare Coon's conclusions on Irish anthropology with ours, in spite of the fact that he has utilized our data. Our deductions with regard to historic and prehistoric sequences of types are based upon distributions of types established by sorting on the basis of objective criteria; his are based upon the general metric and morpholigical features of the entire Irish series of males, intergrated subjectely into a sort of composite Irish type, and then subdivided in accordance with his ideas as to their relationships to Paleolithic cranial types or cranial types of later origin, with some attention paid to the geographical distribution of these types within Ireland. Our sorted types are definite and rigid to the extent of being, possibly Procrustean. Coon's are indefinite, fluid, and almost Protean.
However, many of the differences are of a minor character. For example, there is probably no difference between Coon's "Mediterranean Proper" and our "Pure Mediterranean," nor between his Dinaric type and ours, except that ours includes also some of Coon's blond "Nordics." Coon's "Atlanto-Mediterranean" type apparently includes most of our Keltic and Nordic-Mediterranean types, but some with especially big heads he would assign to to them Brunn Paleolithic type. Our Nordic-Alpine type seems to conform generally with Coon's Alpine, because he does not insist upon dark eyes as a criterion of the type, although we gather that he considers the hair color to be medium brown or darker. But some of our large-headed Alpines would be assigned to the Borreby type by Coon. All of our Pure and Predominantly Nordic types would fall somewhere in Coon's Nordic group and our East Baltic type would be the same as his, with again exception of those considered by him to have too massive heads.
Having cleared the ground for a comparison of Coon's results with ours, by attempting to equate his racial classification with ours, we may now proceed to a brief discussion of the differences and agreements in conclusions. In the first place, we do not think that the big-headed, heavy-bodied men of western and especially southwestern Ireland are necessarily Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic "survivors" or descendants, because we have no evidence that the Mesolithic people of Ireland either possessed such physical characteristics or ever reached western and southwestern Ireland.
We do not agree that size and ruggedness of the cranial vault and stature are sufficient criteria for the identification of Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic types. The evidence for the stature and general size of Mesolithic man in northwestern Europe is so scanty as to be almost infinitesimal. The chances of a direct genetic survival of a Mesolithic or Upper Paleolithic type in western Ireland, either through isolation and inbreeding or selective survival, seem to us very small. On the other hand, there is nothing improbable about the idea of a "reemergence" of the Irish Mesolithic or Paleolithic types in the more remote areas of Ireland or elsewhere in isolated regions northwestern Europe. We think that such ancient types do recur in modern man by recombinations of ancestral characters. We do not know that the western Irish represent such a "reemergence" of Irish Mesolithic types because we do not know what the latter were. We are perfectly willing to admit that these western Irish do appear to be similar in the flesh to those of heavy-featured northwestern Danes, Germans and Norwegians whom Coon refers to as the survival of Paleolithic strains. It seems very unlikely to us, nevertheless, that "at least half of the genetic ancestry" of the composite modern Irishman is to be referred to the survival of strains from the original Mesolithic settlers.
Our second disagreement with Dr. Coon is in his conclusion that the second principal Irish stock(in addition to "survivors of the unreduced Upper Paleolithic people") is Keltic Iron Age Nordic. All of the types that can, by any reasonable extension of the term, be called "Nordic" do not amount to much more than 7 percent of Irish males and our evidence suggests that these more or less blond and long-headed types are more plausibly referable to the later colonizations of Norwegians, Danes, and Scots, and even Normans and English, than to Iron Age Keltics. We think that the earlier Keltic invasions(all of them Iron Age) were Nordic Mediterranean and the later, probably Keltic(in our sense of long-headed, dark-haired and light-eyed), and the last, that of the Goidels, mainly Nordic-Alpine and possibly Dinaric. The identification of our morphological types with different waves of Keltic invaders are admittedly speculative, but it is pretty certain that the supposition that the Iron Age Keltics were of a Nordic type is wrong.
Coon thinks that the tall, long-headed Mediterranean type was brought by the Megalithic invaders and it seems certain that some of our Nordic Mediterranean type must be referable to such a source, but it also seems necessary to suppose that many, if not most, of the preceding Neolithic and Mesolithic people belonged to this type, to say nothing of a considerable share of nearly every later invading people. The long-headed, dark-haired, tall type of mixed pigmentation is the basic and leading type in Ireland and nearly every county group in the island. We think, also on the basis of very tenuous evidence indeed, that a short, very dark Mediterranean type(our "Pure Mediterranean") may be connected with the coming of some of the more elaborate types of passage-graves. We see no sign of the "submergence" of the Mediterranean type except in so far as purely dark eyes have nearly disappeared and short stature is generally uncommon.
Coon speaks of the Dinaric type as having been introduced during the Bronze Age, and on the basis of the archaeological evidence consisting of all too few skulls, he is perfectly correct, but he neglects the Alpine or our Nordic Alpine type, which on the same evidence also appeared during the Bronze Age and is today numerically nearly as strong as the Dinaric, and only partly coincident with the latter in distribution . Nor does Dr. Coon's statement in regard to the concentration of of Nordic elements in the eastern counties of Ireland and in the fertile Great Plain region of central Ireland entirely fit the distributional facts, especially in respect of the "easterly counties." Moreover, the Bronze Age minority, if it is to be identified with our Dinarics or even our Nordic Alpines, is certainly not strong in the east but concentrated in the west and southwest.
We may conclude this discussion by the summarizing statements that Dr. Coon's very able analysis of Irish racial composition and history, based upon our data, seems to us to exaggerate the supposedly "Upper Paleolithic" elements in the contemporary Irish population and also of the "Nordic elements". The basic Irish strain today is, and probably always has been, a tall, long-headed, dark haired mixed-eyed or dark-eyed type which we call Nordic Mediterranean and is surely not referable for the most part, to Mesolithic inhabitants of Ireland, although they probably contributed to it. The second strain is also long-headed and dark-haired but light-eyed. We have called it "Keltic." Some of this type may have some in during the Megalithic period. We think that more may have been brought by the Laginian Keltic invasion.
So far as archaeological evidence carries us, round-headed types first appeared in the Bronze Age. It is possible, of course, that some of the Mesolithic settlers with Coon's Upper Paleolithic skull type may have been brachycephalic! But we are not aware of any brachycephals in Britiain during the Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic periods. Dr. Coon neglects entirely to mention the lowly Alpine type in Ireland, preferring, we suppose, to assign all brachycephals that are not Dinarics to Upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic Borreby type. However, a considerable proportion of our Nordic Alpines are brachycephals without great dimensions of the cranial vault and are also somewhat shorter and broader in the body than most Irish types. I am afraid that we must admit their Alpine affinity and bring them in, not only in the Bronze Age, but with the later invasions of Fir Bolg, Goidels, Danes and even Normans!
Deniker wrote:
Deniker's geographical range of the North-Western was limited. Coon would be able to expand on this and provide a more detailed and accurate description of the Northwestern type.5.Dark, mesocephalic, tall race, Littoral or Atlanto-Mediterranean race, so styles because it is found in a pure or mixed state along the shores of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to mouth of the Tibur, and on several points of the Atlantic coast, from the straits of Gibraltar to the mouth of the Guadalquivair, on the Bay of Biscay, in the lower valley of the Loire, ect. It is not met with anywhere at a greater distance that 120 or 150 miles from the sea. This Littoral race is still little studied; it is distinguished by its moderate dolichocephaly or mesocephaly (ceph. ind. on living subjects 79 to 80), by its stature above the average (im. 66), and very deep colouring of the hair and eyes. It corresponds pretty well with the "Mediterranean race" of Houze, and with the Cro-Magnon race of certain authors. It is probably with the Littoral race that we must connect a secondary so-called North-Western race, tall, sub-dolichocephalic, with chestnut hair, often almost brown. It found chiefly in a the north-west of Ireland(Fig. 93), in Wales(Fig. 19) and the east of Belgium.
Coon writes in TROE glossary:
Expanding upon this:NORTHWESTERN. A name given by Deniker to a blue-eyed dark-haired racial element in Ireland, which he considered to be a segment of the Atlanto-Mediterranean race. See p. 283.
See the bold, italicized lettering above. Those individuals are tronders, borrebies, and brunns from Coon's old scheme. Coon wisely fit them (rare enough as they are) into the Northwestern type.4. Northwest European--Most of Scandinavia, much of the British Isles, Northern France, the Benelux countries, and northwest Germany is inhabited by a population characterized by medium to tall stature, medium build, brown hair, mixed or blue eyes, light skin, straight to wavy hair of moderate abundance, and facial features intermediate between the fine chiselling of the Nordic or Mediterranean and the broader, fleshier Alpine (Plate 2). As types in this population one finds Nordics, Mediterraneans, and stocky, large-headed, broad-faced, often hairy individuals who may have such paleanthropic characters as large teeth and heavy brow ridges. This third type apparently recapitulates in some degree the pre-agricultural population of this region. Western Irish, Scots, Norwegians from the central coast, Swedes from new Goteberg, and certain other local groups deviate srongly in the direction of this type.
Coon admits the Northwestern type is the foundation of Europe, NOT Upper-Paleolithics or pure Nordics:
It is important to note that none of the authors, save for Lundman, considered the Northwestern type, or any Nordic-Mediterranean cross to be a variant of the Nordic type. But rather, the Atlanto-Mediterranean type, as Deniker did. Now that we know what the Northwestern type is and how it was theorized, lets take a look at the Nordic-Mediterranean and Keltic-Mediterranean type of Hooton.Although [the Nordic] is common as a type, few populations in Europe or elsewhere can be called Nordic in the strict sense. Most which other authors have called Nordic fall into our Northwest European category. [pp. 129-131]
ARTICLE II. - Nordic-Mediterranean and Keltic.
Hooton's 1936 edition of Up From The Ape did not have Nordic-Mediterranean or Keltic but instead the North-Western type of Deniker's.
From Hooton in 1936:
By 1939, in his work Twilight of Man, Hooton had defined the Mediterranean, the Nordic, the sub-types between them, and a composite type that he called Keltic.The Mediterranean subraces include a northwestern European variety, obviously due to an intermixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in which tall stature and long-headedness are combined with dark hair, light or medium skins, and not infrequently, blue eyes. This group is especially numerious in Ireland, less strongly represented in the Scottish Highlands, in England, Wales, France and Spain.
From Hooton in 1939:
So, the Keltic type has been established by Hooton in 1939. We can comfortably say that it is comparable to Deniker's and later Coon's Northwestern type.
Mediterranean
Apart from these two archaic and vestigial stocks, the most ancient and far-flung White race is that which is usually called Mediterranean. It occupies most of the basin of that inland sea and sends outliers northwestward in Europe to the British Isles, down through the Sahara Desert, and eastward as far as India and farther. This race is fundamentally very dark brunet white or light brown in skin color, has black or dark brown hair and dark eyes, and is dolichocephalic, or long-headed( head breath in the living less than 77 percent of the head length). The form of the hair varies from slight wave to loose curl, and the growth on the face and on the body is scantly. The face is usually oval, sometimes rather long and narrow, more rarely shortish and square. There is little or no jaw protrusion, and the teeth and palate are small. The nose is usually narrow and high-bridges with a thin tip; it may be straight, convex, or aquiline with a delicate depressed tip; it is occasionally rather infantile, somewhat blobby, and slightly concave. Stature in this group is prevailingly medium to short, but some subraces tall. Slender body builds are almost invariable.
This basic Eur-African, brunet, long-headed race must be divided into several subraces. The first of these is the Classic Mediterranean, as exemplified in ancient and modern Egyptian, many Arabs, Berbers, Italians, Spaniards and some Britons. This subrace is characterized by short to medium stature, slender build, smoothness and gracility of the contours of bones of head, face, postcranial skeleton; forehead of medium height, somewhat rounded and with sub-medium to moderate slope; eyebrow ridges feebly developed; cheekbones flat; nose straight, narrow, and of medium height; chin pointed and not very prominent; light brown to brunet white complexion; hair often deeply waved and sometimes curly, face elongated oval in shape.
A somewhat more primitive variety, or subrace, may be distinguished as the Crude Mediterranean type. The bony contours are more rugged and angular, the brow ridges larger, the face shorter and squarer with more protruding cheekbones and jaw angles, the nose broader and lower with slight tendency toward concavity of the bridge, the chin less prominent but squarer and often cleft, beard and body hair somewhat less sparse.
Another Mediterranean subrace may be designated as the Arabo-Mediterranean. It shows most of the gracility of the Classic type, but tends to be slightly taller, with longer face and very high-bridged, narrow nose, usually beaked or aquiline, with thin and depressed tip. The chin is pointed but juts strongly forward. Pigmentation is very dark.
Finally we have the Atlanto-Mediterranean subrace of this great stock, which is much taller and rather more heavily built. The skeleton is more rugged and the face is especially long, with a heavy bilateral chin. The nose is straight or convex; the cheekbones and jaw angles moderately pronounced. This type is usually very white in skin color and sometimes shows a ruddy tinge. The hair and eyes are dark.
Nordic
The Nordic race is certainly a depigmented offshoot from the basic long-headed Mediterranean stock. It deserves separate racial classification only because its blond hair(ash or golden), its pure blue or gray eyes, and its pink or ruddy skin indicate that it is the result of a radical mutation toward suppression of pigment, fixed by a long process of inbreeding and selection in an isolated area. This area of differentiation is almost certainly the great steppe region approximately north of the Aral Sea. The only other alternative is the Scandinavian region, which seems rather to be a refuge area and only a secondary center of fixation and distribution of the Nordic race. Of course, the Baltic region is the present focus of the Nordic habitat and diffusion, but it seem probably that the Nordic race developed in Late Paleolithic times before the Scandinavian peninsula was free of the ice sheet.
Moderate to fairly tall stature and robust framework are characteristic of this face. The head is sometimes frankly dolichocephalic, but more often mesocephalic,( of medium breath in relation to its length) because its breadth has increased, as contrasted with most Mediterranean races, and its length is sometimes slightly diminished. The face is longish, the cheekbones usually flat but sometimes fairly prominent, the nose prevailingly straight, high-bridged, and thin, but occasionally arched. The chin is often heavy and prominent. Subvarieties include a gracile type which is like the Mediterranean except in pigmentation, but larger, with slightly more elongated face and longer, thinner nose. This is the ash-blond, pale blue or gray-eyed, flat-cheeked type with a rather weak and usually pointed chin. A taller, stronger, more ruggedly built variety is the golden-blond, blue-eyed type with heavier brow ridges; more sloping forehead; outstanding cheekbones; square jaws; long, deep, bilateral chin; and prominent, often convex nose. Apart from pigmentation, its morphological similarities to parallel Mediterranean types lie particularly with the Atlanto-Mediterranean subrace, but it also has affinities with the brunet Iranian Plateau race.
The Keltic Subrace
In Scotland, Ireland, and to a lesser extent in England, Wales, and Cornwall, there occurs a very tall, long-headed type with a long, compressed face, high narrow nose, deep jaws, and a curiously disharmonic pigment combination. The hair is usually very dark brown, sometimes black, and wavy or even curly. Beard and body hair are moderately developed. The skin color is light and occasionally very florid; the eyes are usually deep blue. Very frequently in this type the hair is red and the eyes are greenish. It is easy enough to get at the derivation of these Keltic types, because the parent strains are abundantly present in the same area. They are, on one hand, the conventional Nordic type--dolichocephalic, blond as to hair and blue or gray as to eye color--on the other, an even taller, longer-headed, brunet stock with curly or wavy hair, the Atlanto-Mediterranean subrace. Into this mixture also go some of the smaller brunet, long-headed strains as exemplified in the Cockney Englishmen and in the Classic Mediterranean type of Spain, Italy, and North Africa. Why the pigmentation linkage should have broken down in the British Isles so that the blue eyes are combined with dark hair is difficult to explain. A similar combination occurs in Brittany, where, however, the head form and body build seem to have been derived from an Alpine strain. In this case body build is blocky and heads are round.
I am accustomed to designate these tall dolicocephalic brunets with blue eyes, and the corresponding redheads, as Keltics, because these types are most characteristically found in the areas where Keltic languages still survive--especially Irish and Scotch, or Gaelic, the older Keltic dialects. Red Hair seems to be the result of the crossing of a feebly pigmented blond stock, with hair containing only melanotic pigment and a little red-gold pigment, and of a black-haired or dark-brown-haired stock in which the melanotic pigment masks the presence of red-gold pigment in considerable quantity. Then, occasionally, as a result of some process of Mendelian segregation, the red-gold pigment appears in individuals in a double dose, with the ordinarily black or melanotic pigment either absent or but feebly represented.
Hooton confirms the farce of the Upper-Paleolithic types in his 1946 work, Up From the Ape. In the same breath, he identifies a Nordic-Mediterranean type.
Hooton in 1946:
However, rather cryptically, Hooton will return to the Keltic type in 1946, and confirming it to be separate from the Nordic-Mediterranean and Northwestern. Rather, an isolated type.Certainly, the most archaic morphological type of the Mediterranean subrace is that known as the Upper Paleolithic, sometimes also called Galley Hill or Compe Capelle(or, by Coon, the "Brunn race") from type fossil finds in Europe, and also frequently referred to as Atlanto-Mediterranean(Deniker). This exceptionally long-headed type is notable for the great size of the brain-case and its rugged bony construction. The face is commonly long and massive, but it may be rather short, perhaps oftenest when bodily stature is below medium. The jaws are nearly always deep and heavy. It seems improbable that this type, when identified in Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland, or elsewhere, represents the pure lineal descendants of Upper Paleolithic men. It is more likely to be due to recombination of genetic factors from old strains. It is hard to believe that anywhere in Europe there are inbred, unmixed survivors of Paleolithic colonies. This type, which is easy to recognize, but does not easily lend itself to selection by any mechanical sorting process, is fairly common in Iran and Iraq and probably elsewhere in the Middle East. In Ireland, England, and the United States, a very closely similar type, that differs only in that eyes are mixed instead of dark, is sorted out as the residual Nordic-Mediterranean type, on the assumption that the lightening of the eye pigmentation is due to admixture with the blond Nordic stock. This may or may not be the correct interpretation. There are virtually no pure dark eyes(medium brown, dark brown, or black) in Ireland, and hence, by sorting, complete with dark eyes and dark hair, seems a little commoner in Britain and the United States.
Hooton in 1946:
Wait a moment. What is going on? Hooton identified the Keltic earlier as a Nordic-Mediterranean cross. Not so fast. Hooton differentiated the Keltic from the Nordic-Mediterranean. Hooton would again reference the Nordic-Mediterranean in 1955 in his work The Physical Anthropology of Ireland as it's own type, related to the Northwestern of Deniker and Coon, but separate from the Keltic type. This work was co-authored by C. Wesley Dupertuis as Hooton died in 1954.The Keltics. The Keltic subrace is apparently the result of a mutation or mutations in the basic, long-headed brunet stock that affect eye color, reducing it from brown to blue, gray, or pale mixed. The same genetic changes usually lighten skin color to pale white, or even ruddy, and sometimes modify hair color from black or dark brown to medium brown, red-brown or red. Not long ago the association of fairly dark hair with blue eyes in this type was considered to have resulted from intermixture of a brunet White stock with the blond, Nordic subrace. This theory is now untenable, because the Harvard anthropometric survey of Ireland, where the Keltic subrace is at present concentrated, clearly indicates that there never could have been any such high proportion of blond Nordics in this area as would account for the tremendous segment of the population in which pure blue eyes or gray eyes are associated with dark hair. In a series of 9,521 adult Irish males, representing an adequate geographical sampling of the country, there were no less than 25.3 percent belonging to this Keltic subrace, and no more than 5 percent of them red-headed. As a matter of fact, red hair in Ireland is not nearly so common as is generally supposed(less than 5 percent). On the other hand, 47 percent of our Irish series has pure light eyes, and all but 5 percent of these are blue. Light hair, ranging from light brown to golden blond, occurs in only about 15 percent of these Irish as against 40 percent of dark brown, 35 percent of medium brown, and about 5 percent of red brown. Mixed eyes occur in blonds and near-blonds as often or oftener than in the brunets. The commonest effect of crossing blond, blue-eyed stocks with dark-hared, brown-eyed stocks is to produce types of intermediate pigmentation of both hair and eyes, with occasional segregation of pure blonds and pure brunets. Dark hair and blue eyes rarely result from such crossing, since some sort of broken linkage would have to occur, in all probability, to produce such a disharmonic combination. We must, then, regard the blue eyes of the Keltic subrace as the result of a mutation rather than a hybridization phenomenon. The combination of dark hair and blue is so uncommon outside of the British Isles and Normandy(the former strongholds of Keltic speech) that one is almost inclined to think that the mutation took place in northwestern Europe at a relatively recent time.
There is little doubt in my mind that the term Keltic, applied to this subrace, is a sad misnomer. It is true that the type is concentrated in Keltic areas, but the anthropometric evidence in Ireland strongly indicates that the Keltic subrace was not the original carrier of the Keltic speech. Furthermore, it is today far poorer in Keltic speakers than other subracial types of Ireland. Keltic speech was introduced, in all probability, by Bronze Age invaders, not earlier than 1500 to 1800 B.C. The Keltic subrace probably came in the Neolithic period, as early as 2200 or 2000 B.C. They may have been the builders of the Megalithic monuments--great, rough stone tombs and other structures. It is commonly assumed that these Neolithic immigrants came by sea, from Spain or the Western Mediterranean.
In a series of 9,168 United States males, the Keltic subrace constituted about 8.5 percent, ranking, fifth among the subracial types established by sorting criteria. The Keltic type is strongly represented among the native born parentage and among the native born of foreign parentage and the foreign born, seems to have derived primarily from Irish stock, but also from Scotch, Welsh, English, and Scandinavians.
Hooton wrote:
Here at the finality of Hooton's postulations on the Irish, a revelation is seen: the Keltic and Nordic-Mediterranean are separate types.Keltic - 2408 individuals; 25.3% of the total series.
Dark hair and blue eyes, cephalic index under 80, all statures.
Red hair and blue eyes, cephalic index under 80, all statures.
Nordic Mediterranean - 2749 individuals; 28.9% of the total series.
Dark hair and mixed eyes, cephalic index under 80, all statures.
Red hair and mixed eyes, cephalic index under 80, all statures.
Red-brown hair and mixed eyes, cephalic index under 80, all statures.
Light brown hair and dark eyes, cephalic index under 80, all statures.
Therefore, the Northwestern type can be best summarized as a Nordic-Mediterranean type with Alpine admixture. The Keltic type, an altered Mediterranean, as a descendant of an ancient Mediterranean population that took residence in Ireland during the Neolithic.
All of the aforementioned types are off-shoots of the Mediterranean race, specifically the Atlanto-Mediterranean and NOT the Nordic.
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Originally Posted by Knight Slayer
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