William Z. Ripley

"The utter absurdity of the misnomer Caucasian, as applied to the blue-eyed and fair-headed * Aryan ’ (?) race of Western Europe, is revealed by two indisputable facts. In the first place, this ideal blond type does not occur within many hundred miles of Caucasia ; and, secondly, nowhere along the great Caucasian chain is there a single native tribe making use of a purely inflectional or Aryan language. Even the Ossetes, whose language alone is possibly inflectional, have not had their claims to the honour of Aryan made positively clear as yet. And even if Ossetian be Aryan, there is every reason to regard the people as immigrants from the direction of Iran, not indigenous Caucasians at all. Their head form, together with their occupation of territory along the only highway — the Pass of Dariel — across the chain from the South, give tenability to the hypothesis. At all events, whether the Ossetes be Aryan or not, they little deserve pre-eminence among the other peoples about them. They are lacking both in the physical beauty for which this region is justly famous, and in courage as well, if we may judge by their reputation in yielding abjectly and without shadow of resistance to the Russians. It is not true that any of these Caucasians are even * somewhat typical.’ As a matter of fact they could never be typical of anything. The name covers nearly every physical type and family of language of the Eur-Asian continent except, as we have said, that blond, tall, ‘ Aryan ’ speaking one to which the name has been specifically applied. It is all false ; not only improbable but absurd. The Caucasus is not a cradle — it is rather a grave — of peoples, of languages, of customs and of physical types. Let us be assured of that point at the outset. Nowhere else in the world probably is so heterogeneous a lot of people, languages and religions gathered together in one place as along the chain of the Caucasus mountains.”"

"We are strengthened in this assumption that the earliest Europeans were not only long-headed but also dark-complexioned, by various points in our enquiry thus far. We have proved the prehistoric antiquity of the living CroMagnon type in Southern France ; and we saw that among these peasants, the prevalence of black hair and eyes is very striking. And comparing types in the British Isles we saw that everything tended to show that the brunet populations of Wales, Ireland and Scotland constituted the most primitive stratum of population in Britain. Furthermore, in that curious spot in Garfagnana, where a survival of the ancient Ligurian population of Northern Italy is indicated, there also are the people characteristically dark. Judged, there¬ fore, either in the light of general principles or of local details, it would seem as if this earliest race in Europe must have been very dark. ... It was Mediterranean in its pigmental affinities, and not Scandinavian."

"In sharp contrast, the racial scientists, who will be discussed later, recorded the change of affairs with a note of indignant relief: "In our school days most of us were brought up to regard Asia as the mother of European people. We were told that an ideal race of men swarmed forth from the Himalayan highlands disseminating culture right and left as they spread through the barbarous West." As far as Ripley was concerned, such philological ideas represented the dark age of Indo-European studies: "In the days when . . . there was no science of physical anthropology [and] prehistoric archaeology was not yet . . . a new science of philology dazzled the intelligent world . . . and its words were law. Since 1860 these early inductions have completely broken down in the light of modern research" (Ripley 1899, 453)."