The following is my abridgement of chapter 4 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:
Ice-Age White Hunters Created First Art, Music
Upper Paleolithic Began With Racial Revolution
Evolution proceeded at a much faster rate in Europe and in northern Asia than in Africa and other tropical areas. Submen crossed the human threshold in Europe three-quarters of a million years before they did so in Africa. The cultural achievements of our Ice Age ancestors, living sometimes in the cool northern forest and sometimes on the frigid, treeless tundra, reached a level never matched by Negroes, even today. What passes for Negro sculpture and architecture and is proudly held up as evidence of the Negro ability to construct buildings of stone and make art objects of bronze and iron as early as two millennia ago did not develop indigenously. The necessary technology came from the north, first from the Phoenicians and the Egyptians, and later from the Arabs.
And, as we shall see, these Mediterranean bearers of culture to Africa had earlier been the beneficiaries of inventive genius which flowered still further north. But that takes us ahead of our story.
Upper Paleolithic Man. For roughly 20,000 years during the closing chapter of the Ice Ages—the period known to archaeologists as the Upper Paleolithic, or “late old stone age”—our ancestors lived as big-game hunters in Europe, ranging from the Mediterranean coast to the edge of the ice in the north. Their physical remains and those of their artifacts are relatively plentiful, giving us a great deal of information about them and their lifestyle.
One of the most striking things about the Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of Europe was their physical homogeneity. Measurements made on their skeletal remains indicate a population more racially homogeneous than that of any European country today—and this population was spread over an enormous area throughout a span of time very long compared to that of all recorded human history.
As one would expect, the evidence of their art indicates a corresponding degree of psychic homogeneity. A remarkable similarity exists, for example, in cave paintings found at locations ranging from the Iberian peninsula all the way to the Urals, a distance of more than 3,000 miles.
Sexual Dimorphism. They were a tall, long-limbed, sturdily built race. They had narrow hips, broad shoulders, deep chests, and large hands and feet. The average height of the males was nearly 69 inches, taller than the average for any European country today except Iceland.
These Upper Paleolithic White men and women exhibited a large degree of sexual dimorphism, or physical difference between the sexes. The average height of the women was nearly seven inches less than that of the men, and their skulls were not only smaller but showed other secondary sexual differences, resulting in a less “masculine” and more “feminine” facial appearance. Whereas the men had distinctly craggy, faces, those of the women had softer contours.
Racial Variation. Sexual dimorphism varies greatly among the present-day races. Mongoloids, for example, have relatively slightly developed secondary sexual characteristics, while Europeans, on the average, show much greater secondary differences between the sexes. And among the subraces of the White race sexual dimorphism increases from south to north, with Mediterraneans exhibiting the least dimorphism and Nordics the most.
In general, a large degree of sexual dimorphism in a race is an indication of evolutionary adaptation to markedly different male and female social roles. When men and women have similar lifestyles, there is relatively little need for them to differ physically, except in their reproductive organs. But in the big-game hunting society of Upper Paleolithic Europe, the men went out into the forests or the tundra to do the hunting and killing, and the women stayed at home to bear and raise the children—for a thousand generations.
The break with the past was in the appearance of a new race of men, and the men of this new race, within a few thousand years, created a technological revolution which brought forth ceramics and archery, among other things. Even from the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, however, it was evident that the new race was of a higher evolutionary grade than anything which had come before; this evidence was in the capacity for music and art which manifested itself then.
It is clear that the race which hunted reindeer on the tundra of northern Europe from the second Wuerm glacial advance until about 10,000 years ago was essentially modern, not only physically but also psychically, and was, therefore, the first race to appear on this earth with whom we can feel the bond of full kinship.
In the next installment we will follow the Upper Paleolithic people of Europe into the Mesolithic period, and we will examine the cultural and subracial developments which took place then, including the first appearance of the Indo-Europeans, or Aryans.