THE RACES OF RUSSIA 

 By DR. ALES HRDLICKA, 



CURATOR, DIVISION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM 



The subject of the races of Russia — the great Russia that was 

 yesterday and that must be again if the world is to know any peace — 

 seems very baffling, and is in fact far from simple. Yet if the field 

 is viewed from a higher horizon, with due historical and anthro- 

 pological perspective, many of its irregularities disappear, and where 

 at first there seemed to be an almost hopelessly involved mosaic of 

 ethnic differences there are seen great areas of fairly uniform racial 

 color. 



So far as known to science, European Russia began to be peopled 

 during the latter phases of the paleolithic epoch and the following- 

 neolithic times. Some skulls found in Russian Poland and south- 

 western Russia show features that still remind the anthropologist 

 quite strongly of those of the Neanderthal man, but on the whole 

 the type is already fairly modern. The remains from these earlier 

 times are, however, still rare and limited to territories into which 

 extension from the more southern and western parts of Europe was 

 easily practicable. 



A much more important peopling of European Russia took place 

 during the latest neolithic, and the bronze and iron periods ; and it 

 proceeded, as far as is now discernible, not only from the adjacent 

 regions in Europe, but also over Caucasus and from the great steppes 

 of Asia. The western Asiatic or Ural-Altaic elements, evidently 

 quite early and numerous, overran and sparsely settled or roamed 

 over perhaps as much as two-thirds of the great region of what is 

 now European Russia, reaching in the north to the limits of the 

 land, in the west as far as Finland, Esthonia, Livonia, and approxi- 

 mately the thirtieth meridian, and in the south below the latitude of 

 Moscow. At about the same time the southeastern and southern 

 parts of Russia became peopled by Turanian and Iranian tribes, 

 spreading over the Caucasus and from beyond the Caspian. Only 

 the western and southwestern parts of the great territory received 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 69, No. 11 



