[gothic-l] Re: Sarmatians and Goths in Poland

[Xoxana at WEBTV.NET]

       What Dirk is basically saying is "I don't know anything about the
ancient Iranians or about physical anthropology, and I am too lazy to do
any research, but I still insist that the Alans were dark; and I don't
know anything about the ancient authors who described the Alans, but if
their observations disagree with me, they must have been faulty.  I
wasn't there, but if they thought they saw fair hair, I know they were
wrong.  They saw dark hair and subjectively thought it was fair."
      I only have one bit of information about the modern Ossetes.  I am
going to answer Dirk's objections before he even has a chance to make
them.  Yes, brain weights are not perfect measurements, but this is all
the evidence I could find.  In THE RACES OF MAN, Deniker quotes a study
of brain weights in the Caucasus from "Gilchenko, Congr. Intern. Arch.
préhis., vol. i., p. 183, Moscow, 1892."
Ossetes      1465 grams
Ingush-Chechen   1454 grams
Georgians             1350 grams
Armenians             1369 grams
Elsewhere he gives the European average as 1361 grams, Frenchman as 1359
grams
Scotch            1417 grams "the largest in Europe"
Italians              1308 grams
>From this I would conclude that the Ossetes have large brains. 
     Coon's THE RACES OF EUROPE has some data.  
Page 197:  "The Alans were the only branch of the Sarmatians to retain
their integrity in face of this Germanic onslaught."
Page 198:  "There can be little doubt, even before examining the
skeletal evidence, that the Scythians and Sarmatians were basically if
not entirely white men and in no sense mongoloid.  The only definite
description of them which we have from classical literature is that of
Hippocrates, who called them white-skinned and obese,  but this
designation was employed by the father of medicine to prove one of his
environmental theories.  In later times, the Alans are described as
having golden hair."
Page 199: Speaking of Scythian art:  "These faces are strikingly
reminiscent of types common among northwest Europeans today, in strong
contrast to those shown in the art of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and
Hittites, which are definitely Near Eastern.  The face, therefore, is
definitely Nordic....Persian representatives of Saka show exactly the
same type, depicted by the followers of an entirely different school of
art, and hence this type cannot have been an unfounded convention.
    "There is, in the anthropometric literature, sufficient data to
permit the reconstruction of the Scytho-Sarmatian cranial type or types.
The most extensive group, and that which may be used as a basic series,
is Donici's collection of seventy-seven Scythian crania from kurgans of
Bessarabia, which was one of the favored Scythian pasture lands during
the height of their domination."
    "The means of these Scythian skulls show them to be low mesocephals
of moderate cranial dimensions, but with a low vault height.  the
cranial means are, in fact, almost identical with those of the Keltic
series from France and the British Isles."
      "When the brachycephalic element is eliminated, therefore,one
finds these skulls to be narrower faced, and narrower nosed, and to fit
more nearly into a central European Nordic category.  Other series of
Scythian crania from southern Russia and from the Caucasus show the same
general characteristics as that of Donici's type series, but are in most
cases purely dolichocephalic, which leads one to suppose that the
brachycephalic element in the Rumanian skulls may ave been at least
partly of local origin."
Page 200:  
     "Other collections of Scythian crania vary in their mean cranial
indices from 72 to 77.  those from the Kiev government, a Scythian
center, have a mean of 73.  A series of eighteen Sarmatian crania from
the Volga, although otherwise the same as the others, has a cranial
index of 80.3.  However, one hesitates to consider this typical of the
Sarmatians as a whole, since both the Alans and the early Ossetes were
long headed.  The former preserved the original Scythian Nordic type
until the ninth century A.D."
     "We know very little of the stature of the Scythians.  Nine male
skeletons from the Polish Ukraine, associated with crania of standard
Scythian type, have a mean of over 170 cm."
Page 201:
     "We have seen that the Scythians and Sarmatians, although they
undoubtedly included in their ranks many individuals of different
political affiliations, formed nevertheless a quite constant principal
racial type, which was essentially Iranian and a form of Nordic.  In its
characteristic low vault, as in other dimensions, it specifically
resembled the earlier eastern European and central Asiatic Nordic form.
It was essentially a member of the racial cluster associated with the
spread of Satem Indo-European speech in both Europe and Asia."
      I have already mentioned that Chinese sources described the
Iranian Yüeh Jï as being white with red hair and green eyes.  Nordic
skulls are always associated with a high percentage of blond hair and
blue eyes.

       And now, to return to the subject of this list, the Goths, I will
add a little article about the physical type of the Goths and early
Germanics.

 
     THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE, on page 127, says
"...the Corded Ware culture is still commonly seen as ancestral to those
IE peoples whose immediate origins are south across northern, central
and parts of eastern Europe, i.e., the Celts, Germans, Balts and Slavs." 
In PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF EUROPEAN POPULATIONS, edited by Schwidetzky
et al., there is a chapter called "The Genesis and Evolution of the
Neolithic Population of the Eastern Baltic Lands" by R. Denisova. On
pages 275-6 we read 
"At the turn of the second century B.C., new tribes penetrated into the
eastern Baltic lands. These tribes are known in archaeological
literature as the tribes of Cord-pottery Ware and Battle-axe culture. An
idea of their anthropological type is given by a small craniological
series from Estonia (Fürst 1914; Aul 1933; Mark 1956a). This type is
very massive and markedly dolichocranial, due to great longitudinal and
medium transverse diameters, with very high basion-bregma and a
moderately broad, long face profiled in the horizontal direction." 
"In archaeological literature, the tribes of the Battle-axe culture in
the eastern Baltic lands are identified with the first ancient Balts in
this territory." 
Page 277: 
"All these considerations point to the probability of a genetic kinship
between tribes of the Battle-axe culture of the eastern Baltic lands and
the markedly dolichocranial early Neolithic population of this area.
This kinship, however, is not to be regarded as direct continuity.
Judging from materials of the Mesolithic age, the area of distribution
of the markedly dolichocranial anthropological type was initially
north-central Europe and the neighboring territories of eastern Europe.
It is precisely from this area that the hyperdolichocranial Europoid
population moved to the eastern Baltic lands where traces of its
habitation can already be observed in the Mesolithic age. It seems that
in the periods that followed there were repeated migrations of
hyperdolichocranial tribes from north-central Europe to the eastern
Baltic lands. This is shown by craniological material of the early
(Zveinieki site) and late Neolithic periods (the tribes of the
Battle-axe culture)." 
Now let us examine Harvard Professor Carleton Coon's THE RACES OF
EUROPE. 
On page 85 he describes the Corded type. 
"Corded: Tall stature, mean 167-174 cm.; build linear but muscular,
perhaps heavier than the Megalithic; extremely long-headed, 194 mm.mean.
Vault of great height, means over 140 mm. exceeding breadth; browridges
and muscular markings medium to strong; face very long, and of slight to
moderate breadth; mandible deep and chin marked, but narrow through
gonial angles. Nose leptorrhine, often prominent. This type, in western
and northern Europe, approaches in some respects the Upper Paleolithic
type with which it mixed." 
In Plate 27 he shows "A Nordic Dane of Jutish parentage who also shows
Corded predominance. His face is of extreme length, a trait common among
ancient Corded crania." 
On page 107: 
"THE CORDED OR BATTLE-AXE PEOPLE....The limits of the country overrun by
the Corded people are the Vosges on the west, the Urals on the east, the
Baltic on the north, and the Dinaric Alps on the south." 
"The most typical aggregation of Corded skulls comes from Silesia and
Bohemia, whence a series of twenty-nine males may be assembled. These
belong to a very definite, very distinct physical type. The length of
the vault is great, well over 190 mm. in most instances; its breadth is
slight, yielding a low mean cranial index of 71; and the height is
great, considerably exceeding the breadth." 
What was the physical type of the Goths? 
On page 206 we read "A series of Goths from the Chersonese north of the
Black Sea, dated between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D., includes three male and
eight female skeletons. All of these are long headed, and they belong to
a large, powerful Nordic type which reflects their Swedish origin, for
they are no different from the Swedish Iron Age crania which we have
already studied." 
"A later group of Gepidae dated from the fifth or sixth centuries in
Hungary shows the persistence of this same type; despite historical
blending with the Huns....One is forced to the conclusion from this
series, as from that of the Goths in the Chersonese, that the East
Germanic peoples who took part in these wanderings preserve their
original racial characteristics so long as they retained their poitical
and linguistic identity. 
"The same conclusion results when one examines the Visigothic skulls
from northern Spain which date from the sixth century A.D. Here a series
combined from several cemeteries shows us exactly the same Nordic type,
with tall stature and a high-vaulted skull, a long face, and a broad
jaw..." 
Page 207: "The type represented by these three groups and by the
Visigoths seems to be a variant of the Nordic type to which the early
Indo-European speakers belonged." 
Page 215: "The summary of our information concerning the racial origins
and dispersion of the early Germanic peoples may be stated briefly and
simply. At the beginning of the local Iron Age, a new people, bearing a
Hallstatt type of culture, entered northwestern Germany and Scandinavia.
These invaders were of the usual central European Nordic type associated
in earlier centuries with the Illyrians. Through mixture with the local
blend of Megalithic, Corded, and Borreby elements, these newcomers gave
rise to a special sub-type of Nordic which was characterized by a larger
vault and face, a heavier body build, and a skull form on the borderline
between dolicho- and mesocephaly. 
"The Germanic tribes that wandered Europe during the period of
migrations belonged essentially to this type." 
Page 202: 
"The home of the Germans before their expansion was only in a restricted
sense the modern Germany. The tribes of which this people was composed
occupied Denmark, southern and central Sweden, Norway, and the northern
coastal strip of Germany, from the mouth of the Elbe to the Baltic
shore. The islands of the Baltic near Sweden, namely Gotland and
Bornholm were densely populated. 
"One must not suppose that these early Germans were the unaltered
descendants of their Bronze Age predecessors, for there is strong
archaeological evidence that new people entered Scandinavia at the
beginning of the retarded Iron Age of this region....The Norse pantheon,
with its family of gods and its Valhalla, is closely related to the
systems of Greece and Rome, of India, and of the other Indo-European
divisions." 
http://www.delphi.com/physanthro 
http://www.delphi.com/indoeuropean 
http://www.delphi.com/prehistory 
http://www.delphi.com/biohistory 
http://www.delphi.com/nordichistory1 

http://community.webtv.net/Xoxana/AMAZINGNEW
http://community.webtv.net/Xoxana/RamesesTheGreata


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