Early debates Racial differentiations occurred following long-standing claims about the alleged differences between the
Nordic and the Mediterranean people. Such debates arose from responses to ancient writers who had commented on differences between
northern and
southern Europeans. The Greek and Roman people considered the
Germanic and some
Celtic peoples to be wild,
red haired barbarians.
Aristotle contended that the
Greeks were an ideal people because they possessed a medium skin tone, in contrast to pale northerners. By the 19th century, long-standing cultural and religious differences between
Protestant northwestern Europe and the
Catholic south were being reinterpreted in racial terms.
19th century In the 19th century, the division of humanity into distinct races became a matter for scientific debate. In 1870,
Thomas Huxley argued that there were four basic racial categories (
Xanthochroic,
Mongoloid,
Australioid and
Negroid). The Xanthochroic race were the "fair whites" of north and central Europe. According to Huxley, By the late 19th century, Huxley's Xanthochroi group had been redefined as the
"Nordic" race, whereas his Melanochroi became the Mediterranean race. As such, Huxley's Melanochroi eventually also comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the
Hamites (e.g. Berbers, Somalis, northern Sudanese, ancient Egyptians) and
Moors.
William Z. Ripley's
The Races of Europe (1899) created a tripartite model, which was later popularised by
Madison Grant. It divided
Europeans into three main subcategories:
Teutonic,
Alpine and Mediterranean. Ripley noted that although the European Caucasoid populations largely spoke
Indo-European languages, the oldest extant language in Europe was
Basque. He also acknowledged the existence of non-European Caucasoids, including various populations that did not speak Indo-European or Indo-Iranian languages, such as
Hamito-Semitic and
Turkish groups.
20th century 's
The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Mediterranean race is shown in yellow; green indicates the
Alpine race; bright red is the
Nordic race. During the 20th century,
white supremacists and
Nordicists in Europe and the United States promoted the merits of the
Nordic race as the most "advanced" of all the human population groups, designating them as the "
master race". Southern/Eastern Europeans were deemed to be inferior, an argument that dated back to
Arthur de Gobineau's claims that racial mixing was responsible for the decline of the
Roman Empire. However, in southern Europe itself alternative models were developed which stressed the merits of Mediterranean peoples, drawing on established traditions dating from ancient and
Renaissance claims about the superiority of civilisation in the south.
Giuseppe Sergi's much-debated book
The Mediterranean Race (1901) argued that the Mediterranean race had likely originated from a common ancestral stock that evolved in the
Sahara region or the Eastern part of
Africa, in the region of the great lakes, near the sources of the Nile, including Somalia, and which later spread from there to populate
North Africa, and the circum-Mediterranean region. Sergi added that the Mediterranean race "in its external characters is a
brown human variety, neither white nor negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or negroid peoples." He explained this taxonomy as inspired by an understanding of "the morphology of the skull as revealing those internal physical characters of human stocks which remain constant through long ages and at far remote spots[...] As a zoologist can recognise the character of an animal species or variety belonging to any region of the globe or any period of time, so also should an anthropologist if he follows the same method of investigating the morphological characters of the skull[...] This method has guided me in my investigations into the present problem and has given me unexpected results which were often afterwards confirmed by archaeology or history." According to Sergi, the Mediterranean race was the "greatest race of the world" and was singularly responsible for the most accomplished civilizations of antiquity, including those of
Ancient Egypt,
Ancient Greece,
Ancient Persia,
Ancient Rome,
Carthage,
Hittite Anatolia,
Land of Punt,
Mesopotamia and
Phoenicia. The four great branches of the Mediterranean stock were the
Libyans, the
Ligurians, the
Pelasgians and the
Iberians.
Ancient Egyptians,
Ethiopians and
Somalis were considered by Sergi as
Hamites, themselves constituting a Mediterranean variety and one situated close to the cradle of the stock. To Sergi, the
Semites were a branch of the Eurafricans who were closely related to the Mediterraneans. He also asserted that the light-skinned
Nordic race descended from the Eurafricans. According to
Robert Ranulph Marett, "it is in North Africa that we must probably place the original hotbed of that Mediterranean race". Later in the 20th century, the concept of a distinctive Mediterranean race was still considered useful by theorists such as
Earnest Hooton in
Up From the Ape (1931) and
Carleton S. Coon in his revised edition of Ripley's
Races of Europe (1939). These writers subscribed to Sergi's
depigmentation theory that the Nordic race was the northern variety of Mediterraneans that lost pigmentation through
natural selection due to the environment. According to Coon, the "homeland and cradle" of the Mediterranean race was in
North Africa and
Southwest Asia, in the area from
Morocco to
Afghanistan. He further stated that Mediterraneans formed the major population element in
Pakistan and
North India. In the U.S., the idea that the Mediterranean race included certain populations on the African continent was taken up in the early 20th century by African-American writers such as
W. E. B. Du Bois, who used it to attack white supremacist ideas about racial "purity". Such publications as the
Journal of Negro History stressed the cross-fertilization of cultures between Africa and Europe, and adopted Sergi's view that the "civilizing" race had originated in Africa itself.
H. G. Wells referred to the Mediterranean race as the
Iberian race. While the close relationship between people living on both sides of the Mediterranean has been confirmed by modern
genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense is rejected by modern
scientific consensus. In 2019, the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past." == Physical traits ==