The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to intermixture there
have been certain main barriers, such as the Atlantic Ocean, the
highlands, once higher, and the now vanished seas of central Asia and
the like, which have cut off great groups of varieties from other great
groups of varieties over long periods of time. These separated groups of
varieties developed very early certain broad resemblances and
differences. Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America,
but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish buff
skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones. Most of the
native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not all, have black or
blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and frizzy hair. In north and
western Europe a great number of peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and
ruddy complexions; and about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of
white-skinned peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of
many of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and waveless
as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in the east than in
the west. In southern India we find brownish and darker peoples with
straight black hair, and these as we pass eastward give place to more
distinctly yellow peoples. In scattered islands and in Papua and New
Guinea we find another series of black and brownish peoples of a more
lowly type with frizzy hair.
[Illustration: Australoid types]
But it must be borne in mind that these are very loose-fitting
generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets of mankind in
the Asiatic area may have been under conditions more like those in the
European area; some of the African areas are of a more Asiatic and less
distinctively African type. We find a wavy-haired, fairish,
hairy-skinned race, the Ainu, in Japan. They are more like the Europeans
in their facial type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be a
drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct people. We
find primitive black people in the Andaman Islands far away from
Australia and far away from Africa. There is a streak of very negroid
blood traceable in south Persia and some parts of India. These are the
“Asiatic” negroids. There is little or no proof that all black people,
the Australians, the Asiatic negroids and the negroes, derive from one
origin, but only that they have lived for vast periods under similar
conditions. We must not assume that human beings in the eastern Asiatic
area were all differentiating in one direction and all the human beings
in Africa in another. There were great currents of tendency, it is true,
but there were also backwaters, eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and
leakages from one main area to the other. A coloured map of the world to
show the races would not present just four great areas of colour; it
would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and intermediate
shades, simple here, mixed and overlapping there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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