222 SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



northern Asia, in a cloudy region heavily wooded. With^ 

 out committing himself to Dr. Woodruff's theory of the 

 influence of light, Professor Giddings thinks that a pre- 

 ponderance of evidence indicates a Baltic-Sibiric origin 

 of the blond stocks of the White race. 



The early jjaleolithic men of the Neanderthal type 

 were distributed over Europe, northern Africa and west- 

 ern Asia. Wandering far north, not to the Arctic north, 

 but into the cool, gloomy, cloudy north of the Baltic 

 regions, northern Russia and Siberia, these prehistoric 

 men became quite white in the course of time. Probably 

 at first they w^ere not distinctly blond, but nondescript 

 in color, intermediate, ''dirty looking." Living in this 

 cloudy northern region for thousands of years they be- 

 came eventually quite blond. Under the conditions of 

 a cool, damp climate with little sunlight and considerable 

 gloom, whiteness of skin may have had a definite adaptive 

 value, just as darkness of skin, because it affords protec- 

 tion from the light rays of the sun, is the prevailing char- 

 acteristic of races living along the equatorial zone. 

 Hence, all individuals who possessed variations in the 

 pigment cells in the direction of greater blondness, were 

 more liable to survive and to transmit to their children 

 this tendency to blondness. All others not so favored 

 would live under a disadvantage and, in time, become ex- 

 terminated. 



Assuming that this relatively white variety of man was 

 distributed over the Baltic-Sibiric regions, the Glacial 

 epochs must have caused a crisis in the history of these 

 blond peoples. As the ice crept down from the North, 

 the White race, deployed along the ice front, was driven 

 southward. If an eastward wing should follow the line 

 of least resistance and find its way into the Japanese 



