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The Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula
The Mediterranean world, which we have studied in Asia and Africa, possesses little undisputed territory on European soil. Aside from the western islands, including the Balearics, Corsica, and Sardinia, the only truly Mediterranean country in Europe is that of the Iberian Peninsula. The main events in Iberian racial history, as far as we know them, may be summarized as ***ows. In Upper Palaeolithic times Spain and Portugal were backward regions, peripheral to both France and North Africa. Influences from the north came in the earliest Aurignacian times, and again during the maximum cold of the last glaciation, when reindeer migrated southward over the Pyrenees. The extent to which influences came from across Gibraltar before the Mesolithic invasions is not known, but such influences cannot have been extensive. In the absence of adequate skeletal material, it is useless to speculate seriously upon the racial diaracters of the Upper Palaeolithic people of Spain and Portugal. N there were tall, large-headed men of Crô-Magnon or Afalou type, they have long since disappeared. It is perhaps more likely that the pre-Mesolithic Iberians may have included people resembling the Téviec group in Brittany.
Spain felt the repercussions of the drying of the Sahara earlier than did any other region in western Europe. Mesolithic invaders of a small, rather primitive Mediterranean type brought with them microlithic rniltural traits; their racial characteristics are typified by the skeletal memains from Muge. During the third millennium B.C., food-producing peoples entered Spain from North Africa with swine, sheep, and goats, and with barley, emmer, and other plants. The physical type of these invaders is well known to us, not only through skeletal remains, but also by means of our study of the living peoples of North Africa. Some of these invaders remained in Spain and Portugal, where they became the basic populations of these countries; others passed northward over the Pyrenees into eastern France and Switzerland, while still others passed northward as far as Germany, and into the British Isles.
Toward the beginning of the second millennium B.C., if not earlier, these agricultural colonists were reënforced by a people of much higher culture, the megalith-building tall Mediterraneans, who came by sea, and many of whom went on from Spain as far as the British Isles and Scandinavia. Their settlements in Spain were located mostly upon the eastern seaboard, and on the northern Atlantic coast, particularly in the region of the Bay of Biscay. They are ***owed by other peoples of a general Mediterranean type, but coming from Asia Minor, as their exaggerated nasal form in-dicates. These new invaders brought the knowledge of metal with them from the east, and were the first of the prospectors to visit this metal-rich peninsula. They in turn were ***owed by round-headed compatriots with the same nasal peculiarities, who introduced the Dinaric racial type to western Europe. These Dinaric brachycephals, who settled in the same regions as their maritime predecessors, probably left Spain in large numbers after a brief sojourn, in favor of countries farther north. From Bronze Age time until the Roman conquest, there were only two known movements which may have affected Spain racially. One was that of the Phoenicians, a continuation of the prehistoric invasions from the eastern Mediterranean; the other was that of the Kelts into the north, to form the mixed nation of Kelto-Iberians known to the Roman& Many of the Kelts, however, also used Spain merely as a stopping place on their wanderings. In post-Roman times Germanic invaders, the Goths and Vandals, brought a second Nordic infusion to the peninsula. but the Vandals soon moved on to Algeria, thence to Carthage, and finally to Byzantium.
The invasions of the Goths and Vandals were shortly ***owed by a movement in the opposite direction, that of the Moors from across the Straits of Gibraltar. These Moors, who came in considerable numbers. were of two ethnic origins, Arab and Berber, and the latter group was without doubt the more numerous. During the eight centuries of Moorish rule in Spain, many people other than Arabs and Berbers came to live in the Iberian Peninsula; thousands of Sephardic Jews, some Slavs, a few Huns, and peoples of most of the nationalities which were in contact with the Moslem world. Persians were brought from Iran to make Shiraz wine, which is our present sherry; during the height of the Omeyyad caliphate in Spain, Andalusia became a center of world civilization and like all such centers, drew to it many people from many quarters. The expulsion of the Moors and of the Jews in 1492 robbed Spain of the forces which had brought it civilization, but gave the Spaniards the impetus to conquer the New World. The shifting of population from the wholly Christian north to the former Moorish territory, combined with the drainage of men into the New World, must have caused some changes in the racial distribution of the peninsula, especially in combination with the departure of thousands of Moslems and of Jews. Many of these, however, preferred baptism to expulsion, and the contribution at North Africans and of Asiatics to the Iberian racial body, in historic as in prehistoric times, must have been considerable.
Despite the complex political history of Spain, the living population is basically and almost wholly Mediterranean. As we have seen in Chapter VIII, the regional stature means vary from 161 cm. to 168 cm.; more than one Mediterranean strain is obviously involved.107 The head form is almost everywhere mesocephalic;108 not even in Andalusia does a Moorish or Arab degree of dolichocephaly prevail. Provincial index means as high a 80 occur in the coastal regions of the northwest, in Lugo and Oviedo; Galicia and the Asturias, mining country, are still inhabited by people some of whom preserve the head form of the prospectors of the Bronze Age.109
The cephalic index rises in Spain as stature increases,110 which would indicate that the Dinaric element is to a certain extent concerned with the coastal tallness, as is the early Atlanto-Mediterranean. In northern Spain, in the provinces which the Moors never occupied, blondism is commoner than in the south, where much of the population is as dark in skin and eye tonalidad as most non-Ruffian Berbers.111 Rufosity is rare in Spain except in the Asturias112 and Galicia. During the Ruffian war it was a common saying among the Ruffian soldiers, "The ordinary Spaniards are as nothing, but watch out for the small red-headed men, the Gallegos. They are shaitans, and do not know antiestéticar."
Any careful observer acquainted with the Spanish will recognize a number of distinct racial types; the honey-skinned Andalusian, with his medium stature, lithe body, flat temples, and finely modeled nose and chin; the hook-nosed Cappadocian type so well exemplified by General Francisco Franco; the large, sometimes fleshy approach to a brunet Dinaric; the rather small and delicate local variety of Nordic, with exaggerated narrowness of face and nose, pale skin, and golden rather than ashen blondness; and the coarse Mediterranean type found among the peasantry in most of Spain, short of stature, relatively thick-set, with a mesocephalic head form, a short, broad-looking face, and a short, broad, and often concave nose. This last type may, to a large extent, date back to the Mesolithic, with older accretions; it is the most primitive, most submerged element in the Spanish population. Alpines may be found, here and there, among Spaniards, but they are rare; it is their virtual absence which makes Spain a Mediterranean rather than a central European country, in the racial, as well as the geographical, sense.
Two widely observed racial characters serve to differentiate the Spaniards from most of the living inhabitants of Arabia and North Africa: hair tonalidad and nasal profile. In Spain, as a whole, some 29 per cent of the male population has black hair, some 68 per cent dark brown, while traces of blondism are visible in 17 per cent.113 In most of North Africa and Arabia, the black hair is commoner than the dark brown. The nasal profiles of some 120,000 Spaniards are convex in 15 per cent of cases, straight in 72 per cent, and concave in 13 per cent. In Arabia and North Africa east of jovenlandéscco, the commonest profile form is usually convex, and coneaves are very rare. The prevalence of these two antiestéticatures. dark brown hair and a straight nasal profile, indicates that the bulk of the Spanish population is derived from the earlier Mediterranean In-vasions of Mesolithic and Neolithic date. The Spaniards are more like the most marginal and fully sedentary of the brunet Berber groups in North Africa than like the more recently settled tras*humant ones or the Arabs.
The Iberian Peninsula
The Mediterranean world, which we have studied in Asia and Africa, possesses little undisputed territory on European soil. Aside from the western islands, including the Balearics, Corsica, and Sardinia, the only truly Mediterranean country in Europe is that of the Iberian Peninsula. The main events in Iberian racial history, as far as we know them, may be summarized as ***ows. In Upper Palaeolithic times Spain and Portugal were backward regions, peripheral to both France and North Africa. Influences from the north came in the earliest Aurignacian times, and again during the maximum cold of the last glaciation, when reindeer migrated southward over the Pyrenees. The extent to which influences came from across Gibraltar before the Mesolithic invasions is not known, but such influences cannot have been extensive. In the absence of adequate skeletal material, it is useless to speculate seriously upon the racial diaracters of the Upper Palaeolithic people of Spain and Portugal. N there were tall, large-headed men of Crô-Magnon or Afalou type, they have long since disappeared. It is perhaps more likely that the pre-Mesolithic Iberians may have included people resembling the Téviec group in Brittany.
Spain felt the repercussions of the drying of the Sahara earlier than did any other region in western Europe. Mesolithic invaders of a small, rather primitive Mediterranean type brought with them microlithic rniltural traits; their racial characteristics are typified by the skeletal memains from Muge. During the third millennium B.C., food-producing peoples entered Spain from North Africa with swine, sheep, and goats, and with barley, emmer, and other plants. The physical type of these invaders is well known to us, not only through skeletal remains, but also by means of our study of the living peoples of North Africa. Some of these invaders remained in Spain and Portugal, where they became the basic populations of these countries; others passed northward over the Pyrenees into eastern France and Switzerland, while still others passed northward as far as Germany, and into the British Isles.
Toward the beginning of the second millennium B.C., if not earlier, these agricultural colonists were reënforced by a people of much higher culture, the megalith-building tall Mediterraneans, who came by sea, and many of whom went on from Spain as far as the British Isles and Scandinavia. Their settlements in Spain were located mostly upon the eastern seaboard, and on the northern Atlantic coast, particularly in the region of the Bay of Biscay. They are ***owed by other peoples of a general Mediterranean type, but coming from Asia Minor, as their exaggerated nasal form in-dicates. These new invaders brought the knowledge of metal with them from the east, and were the first of the prospectors to visit this metal-rich peninsula. They in turn were ***owed by round-headed compatriots with the same nasal peculiarities, who introduced the Dinaric racial type to western Europe. These Dinaric brachycephals, who settled in the same regions as their maritime predecessors, probably left Spain in large numbers after a brief sojourn, in favor of countries farther north. From Bronze Age time until the Roman conquest, there were only two known movements which may have affected Spain racially. One was that of the Phoenicians, a continuation of the prehistoric invasions from the eastern Mediterranean; the other was that of the Kelts into the north, to form the mixed nation of Kelto-Iberians known to the Roman& Many of the Kelts, however, also used Spain merely as a stopping place on their wanderings. In post-Roman times Germanic invaders, the Goths and Vandals, brought a second Nordic infusion to the peninsula. but the Vandals soon moved on to Algeria, thence to Carthage, and finally to Byzantium.
The invasions of the Goths and Vandals were shortly ***owed by a movement in the opposite direction, that of the Moors from across the Straits of Gibraltar. These Moors, who came in considerable numbers. were of two ethnic origins, Arab and Berber, and the latter group was without doubt the more numerous. During the eight centuries of Moorish rule in Spain, many people other than Arabs and Berbers came to live in the Iberian Peninsula; thousands of Sephardic Jews, some Slavs, a few Huns, and peoples of most of the nationalities which were in contact with the Moslem world. Persians were brought from Iran to make Shiraz wine, which is our present sherry; during the height of the Omeyyad caliphate in Spain, Andalusia became a center of world civilization and like all such centers, drew to it many people from many quarters. The expulsion of the Moors and of the Jews in 1492 robbed Spain of the forces which had brought it civilization, but gave the Spaniards the impetus to conquer the New World. The shifting of population from the wholly Christian north to the former Moorish territory, combined with the drainage of men into the New World, must have caused some changes in the racial distribution of the peninsula, especially in combination with the departure of thousands of Moslems and of Jews. Many of these, however, preferred baptism to expulsion, and the contribution at North Africans and of Asiatics to the Iberian racial body, in historic as in prehistoric times, must have been considerable.
Despite the complex political history of Spain, the living population is basically and almost wholly Mediterranean. As we have seen in Chapter VIII, the regional stature means vary from 161 cm. to 168 cm.; more than one Mediterranean strain is obviously involved.107 The head form is almost everywhere mesocephalic;108 not even in Andalusia does a Moorish or Arab degree of dolichocephaly prevail. Provincial index means as high a 80 occur in the coastal regions of the northwest, in Lugo and Oviedo; Galicia and the Asturias, mining country, are still inhabited by people some of whom preserve the head form of the prospectors of the Bronze Age.109
The cephalic index rises in Spain as stature increases,110 which would indicate that the Dinaric element is to a certain extent concerned with the coastal tallness, as is the early Atlanto-Mediterranean. In northern Spain, in the provinces which the Moors never occupied, blondism is commoner than in the south, where much of the population is as dark in skin and eye tonalidad as most non-Ruffian Berbers.111 Rufosity is rare in Spain except in the Asturias112 and Galicia. During the Ruffian war it was a common saying among the Ruffian soldiers, "The ordinary Spaniards are as nothing, but watch out for the small red-headed men, the Gallegos. They are shaitans, and do not know antiestéticar."
Any careful observer acquainted with the Spanish will recognize a number of distinct racial types; the honey-skinned Andalusian, with his medium stature, lithe body, flat temples, and finely modeled nose and chin; the hook-nosed Cappadocian type so well exemplified by General Francisco Franco; the large, sometimes fleshy approach to a brunet Dinaric; the rather small and delicate local variety of Nordic, with exaggerated narrowness of face and nose, pale skin, and golden rather than ashen blondness; and the coarse Mediterranean type found among the peasantry in most of Spain, short of stature, relatively thick-set, with a mesocephalic head form, a short, broad-looking face, and a short, broad, and often concave nose. This last type may, to a large extent, date back to the Mesolithic, with older accretions; it is the most primitive, most submerged element in the Spanish population. Alpines may be found, here and there, among Spaniards, but they are rare; it is their virtual absence which makes Spain a Mediterranean rather than a central European country, in the racial, as well as the geographical, sense.
Two widely observed racial characters serve to differentiate the Spaniards from most of the living inhabitants of Arabia and North Africa: hair tonalidad and nasal profile. In Spain, as a whole, some 29 per cent of the male population has black hair, some 68 per cent dark brown, while traces of blondism are visible in 17 per cent.113 In most of North Africa and Arabia, the black hair is commoner than the dark brown. The nasal profiles of some 120,000 Spaniards are convex in 15 per cent of cases, straight in 72 per cent, and concave in 13 per cent. In Arabia and North Africa east of jovenlandéscco, the commonest profile form is usually convex, and coneaves are very rare. The prevalence of these two antiestéticatures. dark brown hair and a straight nasal profile, indicates that the bulk of the Spanish population is derived from the earlier Mediterranean In-vasions of Mesolithic and Neolithic date. The Spaniards are more like the most marginal and fully sedentary of the brunet Berber groups in North Africa than like the more recently settled tras*humant ones or the Arabs.
