(Photographic Supplement, Plate 30)

Exotic Nordics




On this plate are shown portraits of Nordics from places distant from the present northwestern European center of Nordic concentration.

FIG. 1 (3 views). A Russian of the upper class from the Kharkov Government in southeastern Russia. His home is a secondary Nordic center, and probably has been a Nordic concentration point since the days of the Scythians. Nordics are common in what used to be the upper social levels in Russia; this may be ascribed largely to the retention of an original Slavic racial condition, and partly to the infusion of Scandinaviam blood at the time of the formation of the Russian nation. Other Nordic increments may have been absorbed from both Iranians and Finns.

FIG. 2 (2 views, photo B. N. Vishnevsky). A Chuvash from the Chuvash Republic, eastern Russia. The Chuvash, who are Tatarized Finns, include both partially mongoloid forms, as shown on Plate 3, and also Nordics and Nordic-Ladogan hybrids. The Chuvash shown here is a Nordic of a long-faced, narrow-nosed type, and his Nordic character may be either ancestrally Finnish or else derived from the Iranian and Turkish-speaking Nordics of central Asia, brought in both by Scytho-Sarmatians and by Turkish invaders.

FIG. 3 (1 view). An Albanian Nordic from the Gheg tribe of Luma. Nordics, rare in Albania, are most frequently found in the tribe of Luma, on the northeastern Albanian border, where there are traditions of the settlement of Volkerwanderung Germans, and where early Slavic influence is strong.

FIG. 4 (3 views). A Portuguese from Tras os Montes, who shows strong Nordic tendencies. Nordics occur occasionally in northern Portugal as well as in northern Spain; from the days of the Keltic migrations onward, there have been Nordic invasions and settlement in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula.

FIG. 5 (2 views). A Riffian from the coastal village of Ajdir, in the tribe of Beni Urriaghel. In pigment, in measurements, and morphologically this Riffian is as perfect a Nordic as one could find in northern Europe. Nordics are as ancient in North Africa as the Egyptian monuments of the Middle Kingdom, and perhaps older. They survive today mostly in the mountains of the Rif, but others are found in the Canary Islands, and the Djurdjura and Aures mountains of Algeria.

FIG. 6 (1 view). A Kabyle from northern Algeria, a smaller-headed North African Nordic.