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[Ulysses]

Coon, Hunt - The Living Races of Man (1965)


The Living West Asians

Although physical anthropolgists have not spanned Western Asia in as great detail geographically as they have Europe, they have amassed enough regional data to permit several generalizations. One is that, like Europe, West Asia is roughly divisible into several, more or less horizontal zones. In the far north, Ugrian-speaking peoples who came from west of the Urals occupy the Ob River basin. We have already described them. In race essentially northeastern European, they grade into the western Siberian tribes that become more Mongoloid as one moves eastward to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. South of the western Siberian swamps and forests lies a belt of arable land now occupied by the descendants of the Russian settlers. South of that runs a string of deserts, and between deserts and the mountain escarpment is a strip of grasslands, oases, and foothills ending in the mountain spine of Central Asia. On that strip, in those oases, and in the foothills lives a population of partly Mongoloid origin that was almost entirely Caucasoid before being overrun by the westward expansion of Turks and Mongols.

In the West Asian highlands south of this zone, from the Aegean to Pakistan down to the Indian Ocean, and including the Caucasus, nearly all the people are Caucasoid and essentially similar to the people of Europe to Greece to France. The exceptions are a few Mongoloid enclaves such as the Hazara and Chahar Aimak of west-central Afghanistan and northeastern Iran.

The Arabian Peninsula and the desert fringes north of it are inhabited by Mediterraneans like those on the fringes of southwest Europe, but they occupy a much larger and more unifed terrioty. Along the coasts of southern Arabia, Negroids and Negroes live among the Arabs. Some are the product of the African slave trade; others may have been there longer. Even an ancient Australoid element may be seen dimly.

West Asian Highlanders

BECAUSE the highlanders of West Asia are the most numerous of the various groups mentioned are most comparable racially to the majority of Europeans, we shall describe them first. In their geographical zone no large area of blondism like that of Northern Europe is to be found, which is not surprising as this zone contains no comparable area of heavy cloud cover combined with high humidity.

Most Western Asian highlanders have brunette-white or light brown skins and black or dark brown hair. Although brown eyes are in the majority nearly everywhere, the percentage of light-mixed and light eyes rarely falls below 25 %. Compared to most Europeans they have hairy bodies--most of all the Armenians--abundant beard growth, and bushy eyebrows that characteristically meet in a tuft over the root of the nose. The hair on the head is straight or wavy; the beard sometimes curly.

Their bodies range from slender to thick-set, tending particularly toward the latter, and the combined length of trunk, neck and head usually constituted about 53 % of the stature, as among most Europeans. Stature is not very variable. it runs to about 166 centimeters or 5 foot 5 inches. Regional means vary about two inches on either side. Their faces are characteristically parallel-sided, with foreheads and jaws relatively broad on comparison to midfacial breadth. They are rarely prognathous. Their noses are high at root and bridge, and mostly narrow. The nasal profile is straight or convex, more often the latter, but some of this convexity is no doubt due to occipital flattening caused by cradling.

Cradling is prevalent in the western and northern parts of this region, particularity in Turkey, northwestern Syrian, Lebanon, Armenian, the Caucasus, Kurdistan and among the Tajiks. The children of the highly brachycephalic Lebanese and Armenians are mesocephalic when born in the Unsited States and reared without cradling. Among such brachycephalic peoples as Ossets and Georgians, and Kurds, uncradled individuals are dolichocephalic or mesocephalic. pending further study, it seems possible that there is less brachycephaly of genetic origin in West Asian highlands than in Europe.

In the distribution of pigmentation certain clinal tendencies appear. The lightest skins are seen along the Aegean coast of Turkey, the darkest on the Persian Gulf, particuallty in Baluchistan. Eye color also gets darker from west to East. The percentage of mixed and light eyes ranges from 85% among the western Turks and 80 to 70% the peoples of the Caucasus down to 35% among the Sayyads, a group of Persian fishermen and fowlers who live on the marshes of the lower Helmand River; to 15% among the Pathans, and less than 5% among the Beluchis.

The Beluchis are descended from Persian tribesmen transported in the tenth century A.D. from northwestern to southwestern Iran. In their new home the exiles conquered the indigenous Dravidian-speaking Brahuis, but they, as often happens, have since absorbed their overlords.

In the most inaccessible mountains of northeastern Afghanistan lives a culturally archaic people formerly called Kafiris and now known as Nuristanis. Until the 1890's they practices and ancient Indo-European pagan religion, after which they were forcibly converted to Islam by the Afghan government. In their foggy refuge they still preserve a considerable amount of blondism, the exact amount of which remains to be determined.

A Comparison Between West Asian Highlanders and West Europeans

BLOOD-GROUP STUDIES made on most of the West Asian highlanders show an essentially European pattern, with group A more numerous than B, and A2 present as well as A1. But only in remote tribes of the Caucasus do the frequencies of A and B fall as low as among the basques. The fingerprint patterns of the Caucasians mountaineers are also with the ranges of those of several basque series. Except for artificially flattened heads in the Caucasus, the only demonstrable genetic difference between the two peoples is that the Basques are less hirsute.

Whether or not the Basques and Caucasian languages are related, both are geographically marginal. So are the peoples who speak them. Under these circumstances, the physical resemblances between these peoples which we have detected do not fully solve the riddle of the origin of the Basques. They serve to accentuate the general racial continuity of West Asian highlanders and the Europeans of the comparable highland zone from Greece to the Atlantic.

Even the Turks, whose Ottoman ancestors were absorbed by the previous inhabitants of Asia Minor, are virtually indistinguishable from the Greeks in nearly all dimensions unaffected by cradling, which most Greeks do not practice. Otherwise the only consistent differences are that the Turks have less body fat than the Greeks and slightly larger faces. In these respects the Anatolian Turks tend to resemble their relatives the Turkomans, who live nearer the Turkish homeland.

Peoples of the Northern Borderlands

THIS AREA comprises the Soviet republics of Turkmenistan , Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan, and also the strip of Afghanistan between the south bank of the Oxus River and the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush. This is the ancient Turan, long inhabited by Persian-speaking peoples and until recently a center of Islamic culture and learning--a busy and populous land of deserts, grasslands, oases, and highland villages. Today it is occupied by several kinds of peoples; Persian-speakers and Turkish-speakers; nomads, cultivators, urban traders and craftsman; Sunni and Shi'a Muslims; and even a few Arabs and Jews. The principal groups are Tajiks, Sarts, Uzbeks and Turkomans. The Tajiks are Persian-speaking Shi'a who live in the Soviet republic of that name, in adjoining parts of Afgahnistan, and even across the Tien Shan in China. The Sarts are oasis cultivators and city dwellers of Persian decent who now speak Turkish. The Uzbeks are Turkish-speaking, upland cultivators who live in their own republic and in northern Afghanistan. The Turkomans are nomads ranging from the eastern shores of the Capsian to Uzbekistan, and scattered elsewhere, as in Iraq and on the flanks of the Caucasus. Because of detailed studies by Russian anthropologists, we are able to summarize the physical attributes of the principal peoples of this region.

The Tajiks are northeastern representatives of the Western Asian Highland group, with heads deformed by cradling, brunette pigmentation, and a proportion of such as much as 45% of mixed light eyes. They are not as hairy as most Western Asians, being in this respect more like Europeans. Some of those who live in Soviet territory show a Mongoloid admixture, with as much as an 11 % incidence of epicanthic eye folds. Other Tajiks, particularly in Afghanistan, show no visible evidence of such mixture, although blood-group frequencies suggest it--even more than in most of the series studied in Soviet territory. This condition may well be due to gene flow between these southern Tajiks and their Mongoloid neighbors the Hazara, who are also Persian-speaking Shi'as.

The Sarts are essentially like the Tajiks, but the Uzbeks are more Mongoloid than either of those two, with greater proportion of concave nasal profiles, a weaker beard growth, as much as a 30% incidence of epicanthic folds, and fewer mixed and light eyes. Like the Tajiks of Afghanistan, they show a greater proportion of blood type B than of A.

The Turkomans are also Caucasoid-Mongoloid hybrids, but of a different kind, possibly owing to desert adaptation. They are taller than most of the others, and rangy, lean and characteristically dolichocephalic. They have long broad boney faces, with the breath across the cheekbones notably exceeding that of the forehead and jaws. Some have hawk-like profiles, others the concavity of the Mongol. Few show any trace of blondism, or much body hair. Their hair is coarse. Their beards are scantly and in some cases grow quite long. Unlike other Caucasoid-Mongoloid hybrid groups, they show no evidence of Mongol origin in their ABO blood groups, which are low in B. When added to the morphological distinctiveness of the Turkomans, this blood-group peculiarity suggests, as we shall discuss later, that the Mongoloid element in their ancestry was Siberian. This possibility is important historically because the Turkish-speaking peoples who invaded Europe and the West Asian highlands from time to time were essentially the same as the living Turkomans.

Russian Turkestan contains several other Turkish-speaking peoples who, except for their language, are essentially Mongols. They will be discussed in Chapter 5. Chief among them are the Kirghiz and Kazak, who are centered on both sides of the Altai and range from Iran to Manchuria. Compared to the Turkomans and the Tatars, they have had minimal impact on Europe and West Asia.

The Arabs

THE DESERTS, mountains, and oases of Southwest Asia form the home of a relatively homogeneous, nuclear population of caucasoids of the variety know as Gracile Mediterranean, comparable to the Andalusians, Coricans, and Sardinians. Until after Muhammad's death in A.D. 632, the Arabs were simply the native inhabitants of the Arabian peninsular. Then the Prophet's followers began to swarm in all directions until, in an almost incredibly short time, their conquering and proselyting armies and their companies of missionaries and traders had reached the Atlantic, Central Asia, and the Pacific.

Sedentary Arabs of the Northern Fringe of the Desert

TODAY many peoples of Western Asia are inaccurately called Arabs, among them the sedentary Palestinian Arabs, who now live mostly in Jordon, the Druses, the Lebanese, the Alawiya of northwestern Syria, and the sedentary Arabic-speaking of Iraq. Many are still Christians, and a few still speak other Semitic languages , notably Syriac.

The mountaineers of Syria and Lebanon, whatever their religion or speech, form a southwestern extension of the Central Highland population of West Asia, which they resemble in every essential respect. The sedentary Arabs of the desert border of Syria, from Damascus to Aleppo, are physically intermediate between the mountaineers and the Bedawin. They are more slender than the former, longer-headed, less hairy, and little lighter in skin and eye color.

Northeastern Syria and northern Iraq contain few sedentary Arabs because the Bedawin graze their flocks right up to the villages of Kurds, Turks, and Turkomans. But sedentary Arabs occupy the entire alluvial plain of southeastern Iraq, the marshes at the head of the Persian Gulf, and the land along the coast of Iran, where they cultivate wheat and rice, breed water buffalos, and catch fish and waterfowl in the marshes. Many of them harbor traditions of a noble Bedawin origin, but physically they are more like the ancient inhabitants of this region whose bones have been unearthed by archaeologists. They are a little bigger and more robust than the Bedawin, and a little hairier, and darker-skinned. A few are perceptibly Negroid in hair, skin, and facial features, yet do not belong to the Negroid castes of blacksmiths and other specialists, and indeed intermarriage with these castes is forbidden to them.


The Arabs of the Desert

THE REQUIREMENTS of desert living based on pastorialism, the intensive cultivation of the oases, and the need of importing metal implement have created a division of labor that is expressed on a code of chivarly, and have brought about a blanace of political power and the immunity of technoogical outcastes from warefare. At the top of the social pyramid stand such noble camel breeders as the Rwala and the Shammar Under their protection are the shepard tribes, whose flocks prevent them from moving as fast as the camel breeders. Then come the villagers of the oases. The blacksmiths, the Sulubba, and gypsies compete for the bottom of the scale. At the very bottom, theoretically, are the slaves, but in actuality they enjoy positions of greater comfort and prestige than all but the nobles whose chiefs they serve.

These groups interbreed little. Among noble Arabs the preferred mating is a marriage between parallel cousins--that is, between a man and his paternal uncle's daughter. This system fits in well with the whole complex of loyalties, nobility, and the protection of dependents, because it does not overextend the number of persons whom an honorable man must avenge., This endogamy is reflected in the physical attributes of Bedawin, who have been extensibility measure from the Turkish border to the Hijaz, and in the considerable variation found in the blood-group percentages for differnt camps of a single tribe.

The physical type of the Bedawin, which is a distinct one, can best be described by comparison with the Western Asian highlanders. Both have the same range of stature, but the Bedawin are more lightly built and have longer legs, smaller chests and finer extremities. Their heads are dolichocephalic and are smaller than those of any of the mountain people except the Baluchis. Their faces are narrower, their nasal profiles more often straight than convex, and they have little body hair and characteristically sparse beards. Their head hair is black or dark brown, fine textured and straight or wavy, often forming ringlets when allowed to grow long. Their skin, which tans deeply, is usually brunette white or light brown if it is unexposed and well washed.

The Sulubba, who serve the Bedawin as tinkers and guides, are also(ore were) noted hunters, living on gazelle and oryx in the summer when the Bedawin have retired to their wells. Perceptive students of the Arabian scene believe them to be survivors of the preagriculturalist, prepastoral Neolithic hunters,m whose artifacts are scattered over the desert.

The Sulubba differ physically from the Bedawin in the very ways that the Bedawin differ from the settled people of the Asian mountaineers. The Sulubba's skin is little lighter; their faces are even smaller and narrower, particularly their jaws. These differences support the theory that they are the relicts of ancient hunters, and that the Bedawin are derived cultivators, particularly of the Yemen Highlands, who at one time or another left their drying fields for the more profitable life of herding.

The gypsies are new and few. For the smiths who walk unharmed from camp to camp, plying their necessary trade, we have no measurements, only the observation that most of them are not true Negroes, like many of the slaves, but something else, or something inbetween. Oasis people have been measures in Hofuf al-Hasa Province, Saudi Arabia. As they live in moist, palm shaded microenvironment, they differ from the Bedawin physically in that they have rounder faces, their noses are more concave, and their appearance is generally softer for they do not face the selective pressures of desiccation and wind-borne dust.

The Southern Periphery

AROUND THE SOUTHERN RIM of Arabia and beyond the Empty Quarter, or Sea of Sand, stretches a rim of kingdoms, protectorates, petty sheikhdoms, and warring tribes all the way from Yemen to Lahai-Aden, the Hadhramaut, Dhofar, and Socotra Island, Muscat and Oman, and the Trucial Sheikhdoms. In the southern part of this region rain falls in summer, permitting agriculture in the highlands, particularly in Yemen, the most populous nation of Arabia. There the bulk of the population is concentrated on the fertile plateau reaching from the rim of the escarpment to the desert and centered about San'a.

The tribesmen of this central-plateau region do not differ appreciably from the Bedawin north of the desert. To the south, but still in the highlands, from San'a to Ibb, Taiz, Lahaj, and finally Aden, the people grow shorter, and rounder-headed, with a drop in mean stature from 164.5 to 161 centimeters(5 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 3 inches) and a rise in cephalic index of from of from 76 to 81. But if we go directly west from San'a's climbing down the escarpment to the coastal plain--Tihama--which borders the Red Sea, the change is more rapid. Mean stature drops abruptly with altitude to 160 centimeters(5 feet 3 inches) and the cephalic index to 84. Whereas most of the Plateau tribesmen have a brunette white or light brown skin color, the coastal people have an incidence of 75 percent medium brown or dark brown skin. Only 4% have mixed or light eyed, whereas 25% do on the plateau.

The Tihama is a strange, little-known place. It is mostly desert with little rainfall, high humidity, and stifling heat. Water for agriculture flows from the escarpment, and malaria is rife among the Arabs, who leave most of the heavy work to the Negroes and to a caste of Negroid serfs and sweepers known as Hojeris, a people of unknown and probably complex origin.

Moving around the coasts out of this cloying hat, past the Bab al Mandeb to the shore of the Indian Ocean, we come to the drier Hadhramaut (in Arabic, The Presence of Death) whence migrated the ancestors of the Ethiopians and, more recently, thousands of merchants and missionaries to Malay and Indonesia. Some of the latter have returned with Mongoloid wives and half_Mongoloid children, who with local Negroes, give the Hadhramaut Valley towns an international look. Here as on the Tihama the Negroes do most of the agricultural work.

The tribal Hadhramis, mostly pastoral people, resemble the southern Yemeni highlanders and the people of the Aden region in being short, subbrachycephalic, and small-faced, with sharply chiseled features. Their hair falls in ringlets to their shoulders, but their beard and body hair is scantly.

Farther east, the tribesmen of the Dhofar country,rich in grass because it catches the rain of the southwest monsoon, are cattle herders who speak some of the ancient southern Arabian languages replaced by Arabic elsewhere in southern Arabia. Although essentially similar to the Hadhramis physically, they are divided into endogamous castes, among which some individuals of some what Australoid appearance may be found.

In surveying the climate, the cattle complex, the social structure, and the racial characteristics of the whole fringe of Southwest Asia from the Tihama to Baluchistan, we find that we have begun to leave the strictly Cacuasoid part of the world and stand in a narrow corridor connecting Africa and India. Southern Arabia is not an easy place to work in, and much remains to be discovered. When it is, the rewards will be worth the effort.

[Ulysses]

Hair

HUMAN HAIR varies in some respects as much as skin color, and its racial variation is greater than that found in most other species of mammals. It varies in distribution, abundance, form and color, and these variations give environmental protection in a number of ways. Hair color is correlated with skin and eye color to a greater degree among Caucasoids than in other races, largely because these three pigment systems vary more in this race than others.

Hair is a specialized growth of dead cells, composed mostly of keratin, like stratum corneum of the skin, grows out of cuticles in the dermis. The number of cuticles in the skin does not vary greatly, but the number that produce terminal hair, which what we are talking about, varies considerably. This hair is composed of three parts: cuticle, cortex, and medulla. The cuticle is a single layer of unpigmented cells. In coarse hair the margins of these cells do not interlock, nor are they raised very high. In fine hair the free edges of the cuticle cells are raised so high that the hairs can interlock and become matted, particularly of the hair is crimped or tightly curled. The cortex, which forms the bulk of the most hairs, consists of keratinized cells between which lie air sapces, called fusi. These fusi are most numerous and are largest in coarse hair.

except in white hair, the cortical cells contain pigment. In black-and brown-haired individuals this consists of flattish, elongated melanin granules aligned lenghtwise in cells. When these granules are large and numerous, they produce the visual effect of black or dark brown hair. Spherical or slightly oval granules are seen as red. A red-haired person is therefore one whose hair contains mostly spherical pigment also, although its effect is masked. Blond hair is produced by low rate of pigment-granule formation and its granules are small. Thus golden-blond hair contains both the red and the blond pigment components, and ashblond hair contains both the blond component alone. This simple explanation of the whys and wherefores of differences in the color human hair, particularly of red hair, had to await the invention of the electron microscope. It makes us wonder whether some of the reddish appearance of certain human skins may not also be due to the presence of spherical melanin granules. White hair is a product of the aging process, but among peoples with unspecialized hair, particularly among Caucasoids and Australian aborigines, it may appear before they reach senility.

The medulla of the hair may be continuous, discontinuous, or absent. It is made up of large, loosely connected, keratinized cells, with large intercellular spaces which reflect light if it reaches them. Mongoloid hair has large medullas and large air spaces, whereas tightly curled Pygmy or Negrito hair has either small medullas or none at all, like the hair of infants.

Hair form depends to a certain extent on the angle at which it comes out of the scalp, and this angle is a function of thickness of the dermis. The thicker the dermis the greater will be the angle, and the greater the angle the rounder the hair will be cross section. The cross section of the hair, in turn, is related to its degree of straightness and curliness, the curliest hair being the most oval.

Mongoloid hair is the thickest and straightest, as well as the stiffest. Its cuticle has the smoothest surface, its medulla the largest dead air pockets. Of all human hair, it is the one that most closely resembles the hair of the deer family, which affords a maximum of thermal insulation per unit of bulk or weight.

Thermal insulation is also achieved among frizzly- woolly-haired peoples by matting and thus forming a dead-air pocket over the scalp. A parallel to this is found in the merino sheep of northern Australia. Although the surface of their wool may have a temperature of 190 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun, their body temperatures remains well within the limits of normal function. Because human hair of this type rarely falls below the hairline, its presence does not prevent the neck from losing body heat through sweating. Uncut Mongoloid and Caucasoid hair, however, covers the back of the neck completely. And the beards of the Caucasoids may also protect the front of the neck. Bald Caucasoid men retain a fringe of hair around the lower zone of the scalp, which bears enough hair to afford the neck some protection.

Variations in human hair make some sense in terms of what we have just learned. The concentration of reddish and dark hair in the foggiest, rainiest parts of Western Europe follows Gloger's rule, as explained in the section on skin color. Blond hair in general and in particular that kind of blond hair which lacks red-pigment cells, reflects 32 % of light at 7000 angstrom wave lenght, compared to 18% reflected by light-brown, 15% by reddish-brown, 12 % by red-hair, 8% by dark red, and 1% by black hair.

Persons with straight or wavy blond hair have no other substantial protection against the sun's rays to compare with the air chambers trapped in individual Mongoloid hairs and the collective mats of Negroid hair, In Europe the zone of blond hair reaces far eastward from the Baltic to the steppes of southern Russia and even beyond in regions of hot summer sun. In Australia blond hair is concentrated in the hottest deserts. The distribution does no violence to Gloger's Rule, which states that populations of a species living in humid regions tend to have black or red hair, or feathers, whereas those living in arid, open country tend to have tawny hair or feathers. In this as in other respects human beings are just as subject to the laws of nature as other animals.