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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



is reasonably good ground to believe that 

 they entered that region only twenty-five 

 or thirty thousand years ago. They pos- 

 sessed really noteworthy artistic ability, 

 and their carvings, drawings, and paint- 

 ings of the mammoth, bison, aurochs, rhi- 

 noceros, horse, reindeer, cave bear, and 

 cave lion are of high merit. 



THE WHITE MAX HAS XOT BEEN AN IM- 

 PORTANT ELEMENT IN HISTORY EOR 

 MUCH MORE THAN 3,000 YEARS 



One or more Asiatic races reached 

 central Europe somewhere about this 

 time and may have influenced their cul- 

 ture. For a time there was another race 

 associated with them in southern Europe, 

 and, very curiously, this was a race akin 

 to the negro pygmies of present-day 

 Africa. 



But these small negroids soon van- 

 ished, and the tall hunter-artists re- 

 mained the sole masters of western Eu- 

 rope for what, judged by all historic 

 standards, was an immense period of 

 time — perhaps ten thousand years — cer- 

 tainly much longer than the period which 

 covers the entire known history of the 

 white race which now dominates the 

 world — for the European white man has 

 not been a ponderable element in civili- 

 zation or history for much more than 

 three thousand } r ear>. 



Then the Cro-Magnons in their turn 

 succumbed. There are indications that 

 they had already begun to fall off some- 

 what, both physically and culturally, in 

 accordance with that strange law which 

 seems to apply to every social and politi- 

 cal organism, just as it does to every in- 

 dividual, and which ordains that growth 

 shall be followed by decay and death. 



Be this as it may, this fine race disap- 

 peared, almost or quite completely, and 

 in its place there came, seemingly from 

 Asia, four or five different types of hu- 

 manity, all of which can today be dis- 

 cerned in Europe's ethnically very mixed 

 population. 



The extreme difficulty of determining 

 in prehistoric times the extent of corre- 

 lation between racial invasion and cul- 

 tural change and the effect upon one race 

 of conquest or infiltration by another may 

 be measured by comparing it with what 



we know of these matters in connection 

 with the comparatively modern and his- 

 toric case of the Normans. 



These were Scandinavian sea-thieves, 

 who conquered and settled in a province 

 of France to which they gave their name, 

 the name being merely the romance- 

 speaking peoples' effort to pronounce 

 Northmen, as both Norwegians and 

 Danes were often called. In its early 

 stages the conquest was precisely like 

 those which other Norsemen made in 

 England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 

 these countries the invaders were ulti- 

 mately assimilated with the original in- 

 habitants and became Englishmen, Irish- 

 men, and Scotchmen without producing 

 any new racial type. 



But the conquerors of the province in 

 northwestern France so influenced and 

 were so influenced by their surroundings, 

 including especially the people they con- 

 quered, that an entirely new and extraor- 

 dinary race sprang up — a race that for a 

 century or two was, on the whole, the 

 leading force in the development of west- 

 ern Europe. This race lost almost every 

 particle of its Scandinavian culture- — - 

 speech, religion, art, weapons, industry, 

 law. It became completely French in all 

 these matters, and doubtless mainly 

 French even in blood. 



But it produced a totally new and ex- 

 ceedingly able and formidable type of 

 Frenchman. Normans conquered Sicily, 

 England, and Ireland, putting rulers on 

 the thrones of the two former, and estab- 

 lished earldoms or principalities in places 

 as far apart as Scotland and Syria. 

 Everywhere they merged in the mass of 

 the people whom they had conquered and 

 dominated. Everywhere their advent 

 produced a profound and lasting effect 

 on the culture of the conquered people, 

 and yet nowhere did they leave a trace 

 of the culture of their own forefathers, 

 and the}- left only a trace of their blood. 



If we had not the written records we 

 would be utterly unable to make a guess 

 at the causes of the revolutions and to- 

 tally new types of evolutionary develop- 

 ment in civilization which they brought 

 about. The merest glance at their his- 

 tory explains why we find so many pre- 

 historic problems insoluble. 



