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Arguably, the Retzius mentioned by Ripley is the father of CI as the holy grail of anthropology.
The"Asiatic" Basque example mentioned by Ripley quite amusingly illustrates stupidity of the hardliners.
Not to mention Grant, who explicitly wrote that The Alpine race is clearly of Eastern and Asiatic origin.
If Coon had seen that in one population the cephalic index could change by 8 points in one generation, he probably would not have written this sentence.On the whole, the distribution of the cephalic index in Europe and adjacent countries is extremely significant when one remembers the historical and archaeological background, but viewing its present distribution alone one might easily form numerous false ideas about racial origins and continuities. It is sufficiently clear, however, that the zone of extreme brachycephaly in central Europe has several nuclei, and is separate from the Anatolian-Caucasic center and from that of the mongoloids of central Asia.
As far as I remember, already in the 1950s he turned his attention to climatic factors as those that could determine anthropological features.
Today we know much more about the plasticity of traits and their potential sources.
. And above all, we have access to genetics, which quite brutally verifies alleged population movements.
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