Earnest A. Hooton

Up from the Ape, pp. 576-577

1. MEDITERRANEAN
(basic long-headed brunets)

Sorting Criteria:
a. Hair color: dark brown to black
b. Eye color: dark brown or medium brown
c. Head form: cephalic index less than 80

Morphological Types

1. Upper Palaeolithic (“Galley Hill,” “Combe Capelle,” “Atlanto-Mediterranean”)

a. Head form: very long, usually over 200 mm., very dolichocephalic, length-breadth index usually under 75; occiput protuberant
b. Brow-ridges: usually large
c. Forehead: usually receding
d. Nasion depression: deep
e. Hair form: usually very wavy or curly
f. Nose form: usually straight, medium breadth and height, rather coarse
g. Face form: often very long face, deep jaws, rather prominent malars
h. Stature: usually tall (over 170 cm.) but may be medium, rarely short
i. Skin color: generally dark

Distribution: sporadic in refuge areas of Europe and the Middle East; probably commonest in Ireland, Scotland, Wales

2. Iranian Plateau (“Indo-Afghan,” “Irano-Afghan”)

Differs from the Upper Palaeolithic type only as follows:
a. Nose form: always high, broad or medium wide in root and bridge, usually convex with thin to medium, depressed tip and recurved alae
b. Beard and body hair: usually heavy
c. Stature and body build: usually medium height (167 cm.) and slight build

Distribution: mostly in Iraq and Iran

3. Classic Mediterranean

(Reduced derivatives of the Upper Palaeolithic and Iranian Plateau subraces)

Two subtypes:
Characters:
(a) Skeleton: gracile, skull smooth with small brow-ridges and mastoids
(b) Beard and body hair: sparse
(c) Face narrow, oval; chin pointed
(d) Nose form: in the Upper Palaeolithic derivative, straight with medium thick tip, elevated or horizontal; in the Iran Plateau derivative, very thin, high-bridged, often aquiline nose, always convex, with thin, depressed tip and recurved alae
(e) Stature: usually under 166 cm.
(f) Body build: usually slender

Distribution: the hook-nosed type particularly in Arabia and the Near East among Arabs and Jews; the straight-nosed type there and in the whole Mediterranean basin and sporadically in eastern, central, and northwestern Europe.

Up from the Ape, pp. 582-585

The Mediterranean Subrace. Probably the name, Mediterranean, is as good as any for a designation of the great subrace of basic, long-headed brunets that constitutes the largest number of Whites, was certainly the earliest White subrace, and retains the full pigmentation of hair, skin, and eyes that was characteristic of early Homo sapiens. The name is adopted from the great Italian anthropologist Sergi, who used it however, as a racial rather than a subracial title.

Certainly, the most archaic morphological type of the Mediterranean subrace is that known as Upper Palaeolithic, sometimes also called Galley Hill or Combe Capelle (or, by Coon, the “Bruenn 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 Palaeolithic 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 Palaeolithic 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 an 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 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 criteria, practically no pure Mediterraneans. However, the type, complete with dark eyes and dark hair, seems a little commoner in Britain and the United States.

A variant of this Upper Palaeolithic type in which the face is short and broad with laterally jutting cheek bones and square, flaring gonial (hinder jaw) angles is often identified as a modern Cro Magnon type. It was first thus designated by Collignon in the Dordogne region of central France, where Upper Palaeolithic man and the original Cro Magnon skeletons were found. Even here it seems probable that we are dealing with recombinations rather than pure line descendants. Other writers have recognized these so-called Cro Magnons in Scandinavia, central Europe, and elsewhere. The present writer still inclines to the belief, set forth in connection with a study of the Guanches of the Canary Islans (other alleged modern Cro Magnons), that this long-headed, short, broad-faced type orginarily arises as a ubstable hybridization product, the result of a cross between long-heads and brachycephals with short, broad faces, which latter are sometimes hafted to the long, narrow skulls of the Upper Palaeolithic type. A Mongoloid admixture often produces this combination. It may be seen in American Indians and also in the skulls of mediaeval Icelanders who are not without suspicion of having acquired a dash of Eksimo blood in connection with their colonization of Greenland. Lappish admixture might produce this type in Scandinavia.

The second morphological type of the Mediterranean subrace has recently been recognized by Henry Field under the name of the Iranian Plateau type (according to usage here it is called a type and not a race.)⁸¹ The definition of this type, based upon very extensive anthropometric surveys of Iran and Iraq, seems to me the most important addition to the knowledge of the contemporary White race that has been made in the last few decades. It is true that Deniker recognized a somewhat similar type, which he designated as Indo-Afghan, but the pure and characteristic form of type is not Indian, nor (in all probability) Afghan, but Iranian and Mesopotamian.⁸² Nor did Deniker describe and isolate the type in any really satisfactory manner. The Iranian Plateau type differes from the Upper Palaeolithic type particularly in its long, high-bridged, and boldly jutting nasal promontory. It has the same huge dolichocephalic head and massive, usually long face. The great nose may be either straight or convex, more often the latter. I have no doubt that archaeological research in the Middle East will reveal the Upper Palaeolithic antiquity of this type, which, in my opinion, is the most probable fons et origo of all the exuberant nasal convexity that has been distributed, not only through several White subraces and types, but by hybridization among such composite races as the American Indian, and even, perhaps the Papuan type of Melanesia. For, high nasal elevation and convexity behave as Mendelian dominants. I incline to the theory that the original form of this magnificent nose is straight bridged and that the convexity arises initially in a bowing or buckling that takes place when it is grown on a somewhat too short face as a possible disharmonic feature. However, that is merely an interesting possibility. The Iranian Plateau type is occasionally encountered in Europe, where it may be an effect of recombination.

The brunet, long-headed, delicate and gracile type that is ordinarily thought of under the name Mediterranean, I propose to call Classic Mediterranean. There can be little doubt that it is a reduced, refined, smaller-boned derivative of either or both of the massive dolichocephals - Upper Palaeolithic and Iranian Plateau. As both J.R. de la H. Marett and Carleton Coon argue, there has been an evolutionary tendency toward a fineing down, almost an effeminization, of early forms of man discernible in many modern races, both in general body build and particularly in skeletal structure. Marett ascribes it to calcium economy (in a brilliant book at which it is the fashion for cautious and unoriginal scientists to sniff but which contains more strimulating ideas and provocative therories, more suggestions for research on the relation of nutrition to human evolution, than are encompassed in any other half-dozen books on physical anthropology written in the last half-century).⁸³

There are two variants of the Classic Mediterranean type - straight-nosed and hook-nosed. The former is the more primitive and the more widely distributed. It extended in prehistoric times along both shores of the Mediterranean, into central, western, and northern Europe and down into the Horn of Africa. Its area of characterization and source of dissemination cannot have been far from the traditional Garden of Eden - Mesopotamia, which archaeologists include in “the Fertile Crescent.” There is not much doubt that the eastward extension of straight-nosed Mediterraneans of the Classic type provided the White basis of the early populations in southeastern Asia and Indonesia. They probably were the main carriers of the Aryan language into India at a much later date.

The expansion of the aquiline or hook-nosed Mediterranean type seems to have been somewhat more limited and probably later than that of the straight-nosed variant. In historical times, it was carried into North Africa and Spain principally by the Arabs, but other Semitic-speaking and non-Semitic peoples of prehistoric times may well have possessed this variation. Some of this type may have reached India, but nasal convexity there seems largely the result of infusions of the Iranian Plateau type.

The little and lithe brunets of this Classic Mediterranean type have disseminated their blood and their culture throughout the ancient and modern world. Obsessed with no bigoted prejudices as to “racial purity,” they have promiscuously bestowed upon the peoples with whom they have come into contact whatever of their civilization these could absorb and as many as their physical features as the recipients could retain. 

At least as early as 5000 B.C. Mediterranean race peoples in Mesopotamia and Egypt had reached a very respectable level of Neolithic civilization, had domesticated plants and animals, and were making substantial progress in arts and industries. 

In Mesolithic times, we find these ubiquitous and vivacious long-heads squatting on the beaches of the Baltic and the strands of the Tagus, leaving vast residues of their shore dinners in heaps of shells and bones. In the Neolithic period, they have become skillful farmers, dexterous craftsmen, and monumental builders in stone. During the Age of Copper and Bronze, they advanced in the more favored areas to cultures of such perfumed sophistication as to involve the use of bath-tubs and drains. Crete was not only the birthplace of Zeus, but apparently also of Aesculapius and Hygeia. The first plumber probably forgot his tools in the Palace of Minos.