The following is my abridgement of chapter 5 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:
Invasion of Europe
by Mediterranean Race
9,000 years Ago
Roughly 10,000 years ago the glaciers which had covered much of Europe for so long melted, and the 3,000,000-year-long geologic epoch known as the Pleistocene came to an end.
As the warmer climate spread northward in Europe, carrying with it successive varieties of forest, new peoples and cultures also entered Europe from the south. The Mesolithic was, thus, a period of changing racial patterns in Europe as well as changing climate and lifestyles.
New Racial Patterns. To the south, in the region of the French Pyrenees, the descendants of the Upper Paleolithic people who had developed the Magdalenian culture modified their tools and weapons in the Mesolithic period to produce what is known to archaeologists as the Azilian culture (after the cave at Mas d’Azil, France, where typical artifacts have been found). The Azilian culture is not particularly exciting in most respects, but a few of the Azilian artifacts are enigmatic, indeed.
From the cave at Mas d’Azil and from a few nearby sites archaeologists have recovered pebbles painted with symbols which are strongly suggestive of alphabetic characters believed to have originated in the eastern Mediterranean area some 5,000 years later. The conventional archaeological reaction to the Azilian “alphabet stones” has been to dismiss them as a fluke, the symbols on them being mere random daubings, without linguistic significance, which by chance happen to resemble later Phoenician, Cretan, and Greek alphabetic characters.
The rational basis for this reaction is that the Azilian symbols seem to stand by themselves; no earlier symbols have been found from which the Azilian ones were obviously derived. In the eastern Mediterranean and in Mesopotamia, on the other hand, archaeologists can trace the development of written language from pictographs (drawings resembling the object or action named) to more and more abstract symbols, culminating in a true alphabet in the eastern Mediterranean and in Sumerian cuneiform word-symbols in Mesopotamia.
Oriental Bias. But there is more than the rational involved in the conventional reaction to the Azilian symbols. A bias in favor of the Middle East as the “cradle of civilization” has been so strong for so long that it dies hard, even in the face of the rapidly mounting proof that many of the arts of civilization—although not cities themselves—had their origins in Europe rather than in the Middle East.
Part of this bias was originally religious in nature and stemmed from the veneration formerly attached to the Old Testament by Europeans. Jewish mythology, of course, locates the Garden of Eden, whence man and his culture supposedly spread over the earth, in the Middle East.
Also, the oldest cities quite clearly were in the Middle East—the ruins of Jericho, for example, date back some 9,000 years—and there was an understandable tendency to assume that a higher intellectual and cultural level existed in the teeming cities of the Middle East than in the scattered villages of Europe in the millennia following the close of the Ice Age. Thus arose the archaeological presumption, ex oriente lux (light from the east), which saw the Middle East as a brightly glowing center of cultural innovation, from which new inventions and ideas spread out like illuminating rays, eventually reaching even the most backward areas of Europe.
Whether the 9,000-year-old Azilian alphabet stones are meaningless daubings or man’s first writing can only be decided after a great deal more archaeological research into the Mesolithic period has been done. Uncovering Mesolithic artifacts in Europe is much more difficult than finding Neolithic artifacts in the Middle East, where population densities were 100 times greater. But what is already certain is that many cultural innovations which had formerly been attributed to the Middle East actually were European in origin.
Mediterranean Subrace. Until now we have traced the development of a single, rather homogeneous racial group: the Whites of the Upper Paleolithic period who hunted the herds on the northern Eurasian plain, and their forest-and-coast-dwelling descendants in the Mesolithic period. In the last installment we saw what they looked like: tall, ruggedly built, large-headed people with broad faces, large jaws, and craggy features. There were substantial secondary sexual differences between male and female adults.
But throughout the whole Upper Paleolithic period there was another subracial type on the southern and southeastern margins of Europe. Averaging about five inches shorter than the Upper Paleolithic Whites, with slenderer builds, smaller heads, narrower faces, and more delicate features, the male and female members of this southern subrace were quite similar in skeletal appearance. That is, they were a pedomorphic subrace, to use the ethnological term; the adults did not develop as strong a degree of sexual differentiation as did the Upper Paleolithic Whites. These were the ancestors of today’s small, dark, narrow faced, pedomorphic Mediterraneans.
There was never total isolation between the Upper Paleolithic people and the Mediterraneans. In North Africa and in the Middle East there are a few Ice Age fossils of the taller, more rugged Upper Paleolithic types as well as of the smaller Mediterraneans. And later, during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, groups of men from northern Europe evidently wandered as far south as Libya, because Egyptian artists (who were of the Mediterranean type) portrayed Libyans as blond, with Nordic features. Today, of course, these Libyan Nordics have disappeared without a trace into a dark sea of Mediterraneans and Mediterranean-Negro hybrids.
Mediterraneans, however, have predominated heavily in north Africa and the Middle East for at least the last 10,000 years. In the Middle East it was they who first turned from food gathering to food producing, thus introducing the Neolithic revolution. To be sure, other subracial types made their presence felt in the south during Neolithic times—the Sumerians, for example, differed in several subracial characteristics from their Mediterranean neighbors, and several members of the Egyptian royalty were blond, the first known instance being Queen Hetep-Heres II of the IVth Dynasty, daughter of Cheops, builder of the great pyramid—but it was much more the Mediterraneans who made their presence felt in the north.
The Mediterraneans brought their new lifestyle with them and their genes. Some of them, unfortunately, were contaminated with a Negroid strain, as evidenced by the prognathous character of some of the skulls from this period. The net result was that much of Europe became predominantly Mediterranean in subracial character early in Neolithic times.