Since the end of the Second World War, in the scientific world there has appeared one, not that forbidden, but very uncomfortable topic, which, it seems, cannot be hushed up, but a full-fledged conversation about it somehow does not work out. This topic is racial anthropology.
The close connection of racial research with the politics of the Third Reich has led to the fact that racial research has become, as it were, inconvenient, and in the mass consciousness for the last sixty years it has been associated with the theme of death camps and other sinister symbols of Nazism. Anyone with an interest in the study of human races has long been suspected of secretly wanting to “measure the skull” to identify inferior Untermenshes among those around them. Even now, the topic of “measuring skulls” is too often used to label an opponent in a political dispute, which does not contribute to the development of scientific discussions.
As a result, racial research in the USSR (and even in modern Russia until now) was significantly reduced, and the subject of scientific interest of anthropologists began to seem suspicious. Scientific censorship has paid close attention to racological research and, as a result of bringing science "in line" with the requirements of politics, even terminology has undergone a transformation. So, an unspoken taboo in Soviet science was imposed on the term "Aryans" and "Aryan" - they tried to use it only in the context of studying the history of the conquest of India in antiquity by Caucasoid tribes. In all other cases, the connection of the term with the political practice of Nazi Germany was emphasized, while the word itself was always accompanied by an additional definition of "unscientific" or "outdated."
Serious damage to the study of the racial issue was caused by the doctrine of autochthonousness (local, indigenous - author's note) of the Slavic population in the South of Russia, which prevailed in Soviet times, which made it difficult to compare with the archaeological cultures discovered outside the USSR. Local variations of common European cultures, closely related to the racial type of their carriers, had to be described as separate cultures.
The term "nordic" was subjected to the same actual ban, which is especially offensive for Russian anthropological science, since this term was introduced into scientific use by the Russian scientist I. Ye. Deniker.
Moreover, if the Aryans were still preserved in purely scientific books and articles, then the Nordic race was completely expelled - in all post-war books on archeology, anthropology and racial research, wherever it was necessary to talk about the northern, Caucasian race of highbrow blondes, a completely inappropriate reality the term "Mediterranean".
For example, belonging to the Nordic culture of "battle axes", located on the territory of Russia, the Fatyanovo archaeological culture was described by Soviet archaeologists as Mediterranean, although it belonged to the northern civilization, which was created by the tribes, who later, probably, became the ancestors of all northern European peoples, including Germans and Slavs.
However, it was not only in the USSR that anthropology found itself in the position of a science subordinated to politics. So, in the USA a kind of "reverse racism" took shape and flourished. When Negroes were proclaimed almost the source of the most ancient civilizations. Politics became the reason for the emergence of the Afrocentric historical school of the United States, whose representatives, despite all the data collected by science, claim that, for example, the Egyptian civilization was created by the Negroes, and are persistently looking for traces of the influence of Negroes in other ancient civilizations. We have many images of the ancient Egyptians, a large number of mummies and simple burials have survived, which indicate that the Egyptians were a white Caucasian people, but the facts do not play any role and the Egyptians are persistently recorded as Negroes. Open any history textbooks published in the United States and you will see it. Hence the heightened desire to find some kind of pro-civilization in Africa, in search of which the work of many scientists disappeared without a trace.
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In order to recognize all these conscious (and, with the advent of a new generation of scientists, even unconscious) mistakes, it is necessary to master at least the basics of race. I will describe here the main aspects of this science.
Large races and their constituent small races are a complex of inherited external characteristics. Genetic studies of recent decades have proven that race is not only external signs, as champions of the equality of different races have long tried to assure the world, but also rigidly fixed genetic differences.
The process of the emergence of modern man, or anthropogenesis, at the final stages of evolution was associated with race genesis. Having formed in the course of development, a modern man underwent a number of mutations that were reflected in the formation of human races and, thus, it turned out that, for example, the black race in the process of its evolutionary development received fewer useful genetic mutations than the yellow race, and she, in her turn smaller than the white race. This created a kind of "specialization" that evolution has put into the genetic code of people with different skin colors, thereby consolidating the external differences of different races at the biological level.
For example: despite the color, the temperature of the skin of a Negro under the same conditions is lower than that of a European or Asian, and in the hair of a Negro there are more air bubbles than in the hair of a Mongoloid or Caucasian. Research has proven that the average black man will always run faster than the white man, but the intellectual development of the average white man will always be higher than that of the average black man. The yellow race is easier to calculate and any routine intellectual work and they have an average IQ higher than that of whites, but the white race is more creatively oriented and capable of developing innovations. We can say that the black and yellow races will prefer to adapt to existing conditions, and the white race will direct their efforts to change the external environment to achieve their goals.
Why racial differences arose is still not known to science for sure. There is also the most widespread theory among scientists of the formation of external differences as adaptive changes associated with the adaptation of a particular race to its habitat - climate, geography and other natural features. But, at the same time, it is known that life in desert areas does not lead to the appearance of epicanthus in Caucasians or Negroids, supposedly protecting from dust storms, and millennia of existence of Mongoloids or aborigines of America in equatorial and subequatorial regions did not lead to a change in skin color and the formation of a characteristic "Negro" nose.
Racial differences have played a significant role in human history. So, there is almost no doubt that all the oldest centers of civilization known to science were created either directly by representatives of the white race, or under the strong influence of neighbors belonging to this race. Ancient Egypt, Sumer and Babylonia, the most ancient European civilizations of Chatal-Guyuk and many others were created by Caucasian peoples. Even the first civilization of Ancient China, judging by the available archaeological data, appeared under the strong influence of the Caucasian Andronovo culture, and was not a product of isolated development.
An interesting fact is that even the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the horse was, it seems, the achievement of the white race, since civilizations, whose formation proceeded independently of the influence of Caucasoid cultures, could neither come to use the wheel, nor domesticate the horse. So the Mongoloid tribes, who lived in the Stone Age on the territory of China, could not master either one or the other. As well as the most ancient civilizations of Central and South America, they managed in their development without a wheel, and they came to the American continent without domesticating a horse. Even the war chariot, which for a long time was a symbol of military affairs in China, was brought to this territory by the white peoples, who invented it and widely used it in their campaigns of conquest. Take the conquest of India by the Aryans, the great wars of Ancient Egypt and the wars of the archaic period of Greek civilization,- all of them are directly related to the superweapon of these centuries - the war chariot.
The word "race" owes its origin to Sanskrit - the language of the Aryan tribes of that period when the commonality of the languages of the Indo-European (Indo-Aryan) language family was just formed, the time when there was still no difference between peoples and only the biological unity of origin and habitat was a connecting basis between people.
The word "race" in Europe first appears only in the era of great geographical discoveries, in the XIV century - in Italy and Spain, then at the end of the XVI century - in France. It appears in England in the 17th century, and in Germany in the 18th century. Its meaning gradually changed from the classification of domestic animal breeds towards a universal term for identifying communities of biological objects, including humans.
In this capacity, the term "race" has already been used by the founder of the universal biological classification Carl Linnaeus, who also classified the human races, highlighting four: white, yellow, red and black. Moreover, he gave not only anthropological, but also psychological characteristics of certain races (people of America are choleric, Europe is sanguine, Asia is melancholic and Africa is phlegmatic).
Subsequently, the doctrine of races was developed by the prominent scientists J. Buffon and I. Blumenbach, but the Russian scientist I. Ye. Deniker completed the formalization of racial studies as a science, in 1900 he published the book "Human Races". This work, still considered a classic in anthropology, was the first to formulate a framework for assessing differences between different races. In anthropology, a racial classification arose, based on a scientific methodology that includes a comprehensive comparative analysis of human anthropometric data.
Based on the study of large amounts of data, according to measurements carried out among representatives of large races, anthropologists have identified stable combinations of external features, on the basis of which small races that are part of large ones were determined. Stable, long-standing traits spread over vast areas almost continuously, such as skin color, hair shape, degree of flattening or facial protrusion. Among the great white race, several small races can be distinguished, united in groups. In the Russian ethnos, such small races as Nordids, Baltids, and Northern Pontids are most widely represented.
When studying race, one must take into account the fact that most of the anthropological terminology was created by Western scientists and therefore the specifics of Russia are reflected in them much less than the races of Western and Central Europe have been studied. In the Soviet period, the study of the racial picture of Russia was carried out within the close boundaries of scientific censorship, which entailed the creation of its own scientific and terminological apparatus, which weakly coincides with the global one.
As a result, in order to create a unified field of knowledge about races, in recent years there has been a process of adaptation of information collected in Europe and Russia, and the unification of racial types. So, for example, the term "pontid", introduced by the Soviet anthropologist V. V. Bunak, used to denote a version of the Mediterranean race localized within Russia, has long been widely used all over the world, and the term "Ladoga race", used by the American scientist KS Kuhn to designate the northern Russian anthropological type, close to the Nords, was also used in Soviet science.
Soviet anthropology, in turn, generated its own, mainly descriptive, characteristics of the racial types of Russia. T. I. Alekseeva, the largest anthropologist of our country, deduced the following main complexes: Valdai-Upper Dnieper - widespread from the Dvina and Neman to the upper reaches of the Dnieper and the sources of the Volga, Central-Eastern European - common on the Oka and its tributaries, the upper and middle reaches of the Volga, the upper reaches of the Don, the Dnieper - widespread in the middle reaches of the Dnieper and the upper reaches of the Southern Bug, as well as a number of other, less significant anthropological complexes. Even from one acquaintance with this classification, one can see the somewhat scholastic nature of Soviet racial studies, which preferred the descriptive nature of research and feared any parallels with "unreliable" foreign schools.
Within each racial group or minor race, in addition, there are many more local racial types, but in general all of their diversity can be classified within these boundaries.
On the racial classification of a person, the relationship of race with culture, psychology, as well as the racial characteristics of the Russian people and much more, we will continue to talk in the next article.
