The Four Races of Europe (Part I): The Aryan paradox
How Deep Ancestry Still Affects Us
For much of the 20th century, physical anthropologists tried to divide Europeans into a few “races” based on skull shape, stature, hair and eye color. Carleton Coon’s classic The Races of Europe (1939), for example, described Europe in terms of Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine types (plus a zoo of subtypes like “Dinaric” and “Atlanto-Mediterranean”).
Th…
