THE WEST'S DARKEST HOUR

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.

The following is my abridgement of chapter 6 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Civilization of Old Europe
Was 2,000 Years Ahead of Middle East
Most Ancient Civilization Finally Being Uncovered

Before we consider the racial and cultural complexities of the Neolithic period and the ensuing Bronze Age, let us briefly summarize the principal developments of the first five installments in this series.

From the Beginning, some 15 billion years ago, we traced the ongoing self-creation of the Cosmos through an ascending continuum of evolutionary stages. We saw the first biological life appear on the earth 3.5 billion years ago, and we followed its development through ever higher and more complex forms, from protozoan to mammal, in the Cosmic quest for self-consciousness.

We saw the primate line separate from the rest of the mammals 70 million years ago, and 25 million years ago we saw the hominid line—man’s ancestral line—split off from that of the pongids (manlike apes). After that the hominid line continued to evolve, and by sometime late in the Pliocene epoch, about four or five million years ago, it had diversified into several distinct races of Australopithecines.

The Australopithecines were chimpanzee-sized primates who hunted and ate other animals and made and used simple stone tools. Near the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, approximately three million years ago, one of the more advanced races of Australopithecities expanded beyond the tropical savanna of Africa, which was its original habitat, into the earth’s northern temperate zone. To this race belonged European man’s prehuman ancestors. Although no Australopithecine fossils have yet been found in Europe, artifacts have been found there which must have been made by Australopithecines.

Under the greater selective pressure of the northern environment, these early ancestors of ours evolved—culturally, biologically, and socially, the three aspects strongly interdependent—much faster than their cousins who remained in the tropics. They crossed the threshold from Australopithecus to Homo erectus, and then finally reached the sapiens level about three-quarters of a million years ago, hundreds of thousands of years before any of the non-White races. Vertesszoelloes Man, whose fossils in Hungary are of that age, still retained many of the primitive features of H. erectus, but his brain was large enough to qualify him as H. sapiens.

Mediterranean Separation. The descendants of Vertesszoelloes Man continued to evolve throughout the more than 600,000 years of the Middle Pleistocene. As we saw, European culture advanced from the crude handaxes of Vertesszoelloes Man to the finely crafted implements of stone, wood, and bone made by men on the edge of the northern European plain during the Riss-Wuerm interglacial period, about 150,000 years ago.

It was from this time, immediately prior to the Neanderthal phase of human development, that the separation of the European stock took place which led eventually to the Cro-Magnon subrace on the one hand and to the widely varied group of racial types which have been classified as “Mediterranean” on the other hand. This separation, which was never total, came about as the result of a complex of changes involving climate, habitat expansion, and lifestyle.

During the relatively mild Riss-Wuerm interglacial period, the first Europeans began living in the northern plain. They were a relatively advanced group, whose cultural attainments made it possible for them to adapt successfully to the new habitat.

But others remained in the southern coastal areas of Europe and in the adjacent portions of northern Africa and the Middle East. As the Wuerm glaciation brought a more severe climate to Europe, those who had remained in the south were effectively kept there. There was a certain amount of gene transfer with their neighbors to the north during the next 100,000 years, but there was also some genetic contact with non-European races to the south.

The net result was that when the Cro-Magnon subrace—a tall, ruggedly built, large-headed subrace with a large degree of sexual differentiation—appeared in Europe about 40,000 years ago, it differed to a greater or lesser extent from the various Mediterranean types to the south and southeast.

Some of these Mediterraneans—those who had continued to exchange genes with the northern Europeans during the Wuerm glaciation—can be considered as kinsmen of the Cro-Magnons and as fully White. They differed primarily in being somewhat more gracile (less rugged and angular in bony structure) and in having somewhat smaller heads and narrower faces and jaws.

Others, whose genetic contacts were less with Europe and more with the Middle East and Africa, differed substantially from the Cro-Magnons. Most of these were much shorter (although there were notable exceptions, e.g., in northeast Africa) and more gracile than the Cro-Magnons, pedomorphic, and—judging from their descendants—dark. Their heads were smaller and their facial structure quite different—so different, in fact, that they should not be classified as White.

Racial Classifications. European anthropologists have developed a somewhat involved scheme of racial classification to comprise these non-White Mediterraneans, with groupings designated as Hither Asiatic, Oriental, Hamitic, etc. Since we are concerned only with the ancestors of today’s Whites, we will not become involved further with the subtleties of these groupings but will merely try to indicate whether any particular Mediterranean group should be considered fully White, marginally White, or non-White. Because of the racial mixing which has taken place in the Mediterranean area, with a consequently large number of gradations of racial character, such indications may sometimes be arbitrary.

The Cro-Magnon subrace, which was the principal racial element in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods—i.e., from about 40,000 years ago until the introduction of farming 6,000-8,000 years ago—is represented today by groups of Upper Paleolithic survivors in Ireland, northern Germany, Scandinavia, and other parts of northern Europe. They were described and pictured in the fourth installment in this series.

The Cro-Magnon homeland may be considered to be the vast northern European plain, stretching from the Alps in the south to the North Sea and the Baltic Sea in the north, and from Ireland in the west to the Urals in the east.

Alpine Subrace. The Alpine subrace, which was described in the fifth installment, has been derived from the Cro-Magnon subrace through a complex of genetic changes involving a reduction in stature, a decrease in relative head length, a slight decrease in sexual differentiation—and, perhaps, some Mediterranean admixture. The Alpine homeland is the mountain belt stretching across western and central Europe – i.e., it is in that region that Alpines have historically constituted the largest portion of the population.

And the various Mediterranean types, whose ancestors developed more or less separately from the Cro-Magnon subrace, have their homelands along the African and European shores of the Mediterranean Sea and in the Middle East.

We noted in the fifth installment that it was in the Mediterranean racial area, on Europe’s borders rather than in its interior, that the Neolithic revolution began. And, thus, beginning about 9,000 years ago, the Mediterraneans gained a strong numerical advantage over the Cro-Magnons and their Alpine relatives. Several groups of Mediterraneans, representing several varieties, were able to push northward and westward into Europe, initially swamping the sparse hunter-gatherer population.

But the Mediterraneans were not the only ones to invade the Cro-Magnon areas of Europe during the Neolithic period. From the steppes of southern Russia, in the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian, came wave after wave of a subrace which differed from all the others we have encountered thus far. Not quite as ruggedly built as the Cro-Magnons, yet more so than the Mediterraneans, they were tall and fair.

They may have learned the arts of agriculture from earlier contact with a nearby Mediterranean group, or they may have developed farming on their own, but, whichever the case, they were already carrying these arts westward and northwestward with them nearly 6,000 years ago. Superb craftsmen as well as farmers and cattle breeders, they were, above all else, warriors. Wherever they went they conquered and ruled.

And their culture ruled also. Their language replaced the language of the conquered peoples everywhere, as did also their religion, their art, and their social customs. They were the Nordics.

The Nordics will play the leading role in this series henceforth, just as they have in the world for the past 6,000 years. But let us fix in our minds a few of the more significant general features of the European world of the Neolithic period which we have not considered yet, before we focus our attention on the Nordics.

This Old European civilization, as it has been recently named, boasted walled towns of more than 1,000 inhabitants (one near Kiev had 20,000), with stone temples and brick houses. Copper objects were being produced at several sites, and a linear script had come into use. This latter development was nearly 2,000 years ahead of a similar development in the Middle East.

Although extensive trade in both raw materials and manufactured products was being carried on with Asia Minor and the Middle East, it should be emphasized that the Old European culture of 7,500 years ago was strictly European and not a Middle Eastern import. The Mediterranean farmers who began spreading from the coastal areas into the Balkan interior 9,000 years ago brought sheep, goats, and barley (which were not indigenous to Europe) with them, but after that initial impulse the Old European culture developed in its own distinctive way, independently of the Middle East.

The Old European civilization lasted about 3,000 years—i.e., until about 5,500 years ago—and then it disintegrated utterly. Its temples and gods, its towns, its language—all disappeared in an overwhelming disaster: the arrival of Bronze Age Nordic warriors from the east.


Lost Civilization

It may seem surprising that so little was known of the Old European civilization until the archaeological findings of the last few years, considering the fact that it flourished so long and reached such heights right in the European heartland. How is it that we know so much more about the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt than about a civilization so much more important to us?

Part of the answer undoubtedly is that the Old European civilization thrived in an area which has been much more exposed to the ravages of time, with armies and migrating streams of people crossing and recrossing it throughout the last 5,500 years, while the ruins of other civilizations have lain abandoned and relatively undisturbed.

And part of the answer lies in the thoroughness of the transformation wrought by the Nordic conquerors of Old Europe. In Egypt, despite invasions by alien peoples from time to time, and despite the gradual racial mongrelization of the Egyptians, there has remained a certain degree of continuity over the last 5,000 years. But of Old Europe there remains hardly a trace above ground.

We are unable to decipher a single Old European inscription, and only in a few modern European place names does any evidence of their language survive, much in the way American Indian place names survive in this country today. Besides the artifacts and fossils now being unearthed by archaeologists, one of our few sources of knowledge of the Old Europeans may lie in the religious myths of the descendants of their conquerors, as we shall soon see.

In the next installment we will consider certain aspects of the interaction between the Nordics and the citizens of Old Europe, and we will also look at the Megalithic culture of Western Europe.

The following is my abridgement of chapter 7 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Nordic Invasions 6,000 Years Ago Brought Masculine Spirit to Europe
Nordic Establish New Heartland in North
Language Gives Clues to Racial Roots

The Nordic subrace of the White, or European, race made its first appearance in Europe west of the Black Sea about 6,400 years ago. Before that the Nordics were concentrated in southern Russia and the eastern Ukraine, in the region north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

Skeletally they fall between the Cro-Magnon and Mediterranean extremes in several respects, but they present a unique set of skeletal characteristics of their own. They resemble the early Sumerians, but whether a close Sumerian-Nordic relationship actually exists remains unknown.

Ice Age Blondes. The earliest evidence on the Nordics tells us nothing about their pigmentation, and we can only infer that they were blondes, with light hair and skin and blue or gray eyes, from later evidence. We have good general reasons, however, for believing that all the peoples in Europe at the close of the Ice Age, except those on the southern border, were blondes.

Most of Europe was cold and cloudy at that time, with the surface receiving relatively little sunlight. Thus, the dark pigmentation that protects races which evolved in sunny climates from excessive ultraviolet radiation would have served no useful purpose for Paleolithic Europeans.

The Mediterraneans who invaded Europe in Neolithic times had presumably not been there long enough to lose their pigmentation by the time of the first Nordic incursion, and so there would have been a strong contrast in the appearance of the two subraces.

The Nordic homeland in southern Russia was wetter 7,000 years ago than it is today, and what is now arid steppe was then an area of mixed forest and grassland. The geologic evidence for this agrees well with the linguistic evidence.

Nordics were, above all else, warriors. Weapons were always the most prominent artifacts buried with them. Next to their weapons in their regard were their horses, and a dead warrior’s horse was often sacrificed and buried with him.

So, too, sometimes were their wives and their slaves. (The Hindu practice of suttee had its origin in the Nordic invasion of India 35 centuries ago.) Both slave sacrifice and the rich burials of some Nordics testify to a highly stratified or hierarchical social structure.

 
Conquest of Europe

They erupted into Old Europe in three major waves, beginning about 6,400 years ago and spanning sixteen centuries.

The Nordics cut through Old Europe like a hot knife through warm butter. Their first invasion wave carried them as far west as the Rhine. It was a relatively thin wave, however, and it left some areas of Old Europe more or less intact—notably, the western Ukraine—while other areas were totally disrupted and subjugated. Even in the latter areas—such as the region immediately west of the Black Sea, comprising present-day Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Hungary—the Nordics were not numerous enough to replace the Mediterranean population.

Instead, the conquering Nordics of the first wave reduced the Mediterraneans to helots and formed a ruling aristocracy over them. In some cases it was a purely male aristocracy, formed by Nordic warriors who were not accompanied by women and children of their own race but who instead took Mediterranean wives from the conquered areas. Everywhere the conquerors built citadels, usually hill forts, to anchor their conquests.

The Second Wave. The two races and their cultures coexisted in this way for more than 800 years. Then the second wave of Nordics came boiling out of their eastern homeland, about 5,400 years ago, and the last remnants of Old Europe were submerged. The warriors of this second wave brought their women with them, and the racial makeup of Europe began to change more profoundly.

Meanwhile, population pressure continued to build up back in the Nordic heartland. The third wave to hit Europe, between 5,000 and 4,800 years ago, was more massive than the first two, and the racial balance was shifted even further toward a Nordic predominance in many areas. In eastern Europe only Crete, the Cyclades, and Greece remained unaffected, with a relatively pure Mediterranean population.

The racial situation in Europe 4,800 years ago, then, was roughly as follows: the Mediterraneans were the principal population element in southwestern Europe and in the aforementioned areas of southeastern Europe. The Nordics were the principal element in southern Russia, from the Urals to the Dniester, which was the old Nordic homeland; and in north-central Europe, north to the Baltic and west to Jutland, which had not been heavily settled prior to the Nordic invasions.

The detailed racial distribution was actually more complex than the foregoing rough description indicates. Groups of Mediterraneans displaced from their original habitat by one or another of the Nordic waves later amalgamated with Nordics in areas well beyond the bounds of Old Europe. And, of course, there were still areas of predominant Cro-Magnon population, principally in the far north and the far west.

A New Heartland. The process of racial change begun by the Nordic invasions from the east continued long after the invasions ended. They were as decisive in shaping the racial destiny of Europe—and of the planet—as was the Mediterranean invasion of Cro-Magnon Europe 3,000 years earlier. They established a new Nordic heartland in northern Europe—a Nordic heartland from which new invasions would pour forth in the future, transforming southern Europe, as we shall see in future installments in this series.

Although we can decipher none of their religious inscriptions, it seems safe to assume that, like other soil-bound peoples, their religion was centered on the concept of fertility. Certainly, this is suggested by the abundance of female figurines, stylized vulva symbols, and other evidences of a flourishing fertility cult which have been unearthed by archaeologists along with other remnants of the Old European culture.

Warrior Religion. In contrast, the Battle-Axe People, the blond horsemen from the east, the conquerors of Old Europe, were a race on the move. Nordic, active, patriarchal, dominating, they too farmed and bred livestock; but they were far less soil-bound in their outlook than the Mediterraneans. Warriors, explorers, rulers, they were less concerned with the mysteries of plant and animal reproduction and more concerned with valor, honor, and authority. Their spiritual focus was upward and outward, toward the sky and far horizons, rather than downward toward the soil and inward toward their own bodily functions, as in the case of the Mediterraneans. Theirs was the religion of the Sky Father.

The religion of the Scandinavians until a few hundred years ago, when it was forcibly replaced by Christianity, had a pantheon divided into gods and goddesses belonging to two distinct groups, the Aesir and the Vanir. The principal gods among the Aesir—Odin, Thor, and Tyr—are associated with the sky and with manly activities. Both Odin and Tyr were, at different times, assigned the roles of Sky Father and of war god. Thor, the thunderer, was the god of the air, of lightning, and of defense against enemies.

The three principal Vanir—Njord, Frey, and Freya—are, on the other hand, associated with the earth and the sea, with fecundity, and with sexual pleasure. Njord is clearly a masculinized version of Nerthus, the Earth Mother. Frey and Freya personify the male and female sexual principles, respectively.

The Heimskringla, a semi-historical compendium of the lives of the Norse kings, written early in the thirteenth century by Snorri Sturlason, the great Icelandic poet and historian, begins with the Ynglingasaga, an almost wholly non-historical account of conflict between Aesir and Vanir. In Snorri’s scheme of things the Aesir were the biological ancestors of the Norse kings, and he interprets the racial memory of a long-ago migration of people in this light.

His account correctly places the ancestral home of the Aesir (i.e., of the people whose gods the Aesir were) in the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, but its geographical and historical details are not to be relied on.

 
Language and race

It is, of course, a shame that we have not a trace left of the languages spoken by the Cro-Magnon hunters of the Ice Age, and only a few undecipherable scraps left of the languages spoken (and, perhaps, written) by the Mediterranean peoples of Old Europe. Those languages of our White cousins and ancestors are lost to us forever. But the Nordic conquerors of Europe, in those long-ago invasions, though they thoroughly obliterated the indigenous languages of Europe, gave us something immensely valuable in return in the form of linguistic unity over a vast area of the earth’s surface.

It is because of this that 99 per cent of the White people on earth today speak languages which are closely related to one another. The psyche of a race, which is genetically determined, in turn determines the broad outlines of the forms taken by the race’s cultural developments, including language. And the structure of a people’s language certainly plays a major role in that people’s approach to the world around them—ultimately, in their manner and degree of success in coping with the world.

English, Swedish, and German may sound quite different to the ear, but they are, in fact, very close to one another; their structures are the same; they have words for the same concepts; they are used by peoples whose manner of thinking is the same. And they differ radically from any non-Indo-European language, such as Chinese, Hebrew, or Xhosa.

The earliest split of Proto-Indo-European was into a western (or centum) branch and an eastern (or satem) branch. To the western branch belong the Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and Greek languages; to the eastern branch the Baltic, Slavic, Iranian, and Indic languages. (The last two groups of languages are spoken by non-European peoples today, the consequence of prehistoric conquests by Nordics.)

After this initial splitting, further branching has occurred: Germanic has branched into the North Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faeroese, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and the West Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Flemish, Frisian, and English); Celtic has branched into Welsh, Breton, Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gaelic; and Italic has branched into Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal, French, Italian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Sardinian, and Romanian (to mention only extant languages).

The following is my abridgement of chapter 8 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Scientific Dating Shows Megalithic Culture
Originated in Northwest Europe
Megalithic Racial Stocks Were Cro-Magnon, Nordic

Northwestern Europe would certainly have switched from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic lifestyle around 6,000 years ago in any event, because the new and a vastly more efficient lifestyle was sweeping inexorably northward just as fast as the gradually changing climate would allow. But, had the Nordics not invaded the area at this time, it would have been Mediterraneans rather than Nordics who brought the change. Then the relatively empty spaces of the north would have acquired a Mediterranean population base.

As it was, a new Nordic heartland was soon established in Scandinavia and the Baltic-North Sea area, profoundly influencing the further development of all western and central Europe. Just as the Mediterraneans had earlier swamped the food-gathering Mesolithic population of the Balkan peninsula by having a lifestyle which allowed the land to support a much higher density of population, so the Nordic invaders of the north and northwest greatly expanded their numbers there within a short time, preempting any further Mediterranean expansion.

Failure to Kill. In most instances the Nordics did not kill off the indigenous populations of the Mediterranean-occupied areas they conquered, leaving the land empty for themselves. Instead they enslaved the natives, establishing themselves as a ruling aristocracy.

Thus, only in those areas of Mediterranean settlement which received a very substantial Nordic influx was there a significant change in the racial character of the population. Elsewhere the Nordics imposed their Indo-European language, their religion, and other elements of their culture on the Mediterranean population and then gradually sank from sight into the numerically greater Mediterranean substratum as interbreeding took its toll.

In the north, however, things proceeded differently. For one thing, the largely Cro-Magnon population there was quite sparse, as was always the case where a food-gathering economy prevailed. Secondly, the Cro-Magnon race was not as amenable to being enslaved as was the Mediterranean race—even if there had been enough of them to support a Nordic ruling class with their labors.

The development in the north, therefore, was much more organic than in the conquered lands to the south: Nordics became not only the ruling aristocracy, but the peasantry as well. They blended with the Cro-Magnons, producing local populations which varied from mostly Nordic to mostly Cro-Magnon, but with the Nordic element eventually predominating in most areas.

This transformation of northwestern Europe took place over a period of many centuries, and all its details are by no means clear to prehistorians yet. One outstanding development during this period was the erection of megalithic structures in many areas of western Europe (megalith: “large stone”). Massive blocks of stone, some weighing more than 100 tons, were used to build collective tombs and open-air temples, from the Orkney Islands in the north to Malta in the south.

Megalithic Technology. Stonehenge, the celebrated megalithic temple and observatory in southern Britain, although it is exceptional in some ways, provides excellent insight into several aspects of life in northwestern Europe in the period following the first Indo-European arrival there.

The impressive stone monument which we think of today as Stonehenge was constructed about 4,100 years ago. It stands on the site of earlier constructions of similar purpose, however, which may be as much as 200 years older.

Today many of the original stones are missing, having been removed to be used for other purposes in past centuries, their former presence attested only by the holes in which they once stood. Others have fallen over. All are badly weathered and scarred by the passage of more than 40 centuries.

Until a few years ago most prehistorians took it for granted that the builders of Stonehenge—and of all other megalithic structures in western Europe—copied earlier megalithic models in the eastern Mediterranean. Some believed that Mediterranean immigrants to northwestern Europe carried their skills with them, while others held that it was only the knowledge itself which had traveled northwestward, but all agreed that the White “barbarians” of Europe couldn’t possibly have managed a feat like Stonehenge by themselves. It had to have been done—or, at least, the know-how furnished —by some Levantines, some clever Semites.

Such an assumption followed naturally from the Judeo-Christian bias of the 19th century, a century which was still greatly under the influence of the Old Testament, with its Middle Eastern locale: all human culture originated in the Garden of Eden and spread out from there.

Radiocarbon Dating. Even with the advent of radiocarbon dating in 1949, the notion of cultural diffusion from the Middle East was maintained by many. It was not until the calibration of radiocarbon dates against the absolute tree-ring calendar in the late 1960’s that the insidious tyranny of the ex oriente lux (light from the East) doctrine was finally overthrown.

When applied to sites in northwestern Europe of the megalithic period, the effect of the new tree-ring calibration is to push radiocarbon dates back about 500 years. Thus, a radiocarbon age of 3,600 years for Stonehenge has been corrected to 4, 100 years.

Other megalithic henge-type remnants in western Europe date back more than 5,600 years, and there are megalithic stone tombs in Brittany more than 6,000 years old. The oldest massive-stone structures in the Mediterranean region, the Egyptian pyramids, are about 4,700 years old. And the megalithic tombs of Malta and Crete, which were once thought to have been the models for similar tombs in northwestern Europe, are many centuries younger.

Megalithic cultural diffusion, if it took place at all, was from northwest to southeast, not the other way.

Of course, the racial situation in megalithic Europe was fairly complex, and it was by no means uniform. Some Mediterraneans undoubtedly found their way into northwestern Europe and formed an element in the megalithic population. But they probably came by land, from the portions of central and southeastern Europe disrupted by the Indo-European invasions from beyond the Black Sea, rather than by sea.

The Nordics did not, by any means, fill up all of northwestern Europe and convert the entire region into a new Nordic homeland. Mediterranean groups were observed in this part of Europe by the Romans (the Silures of Wales, described by Tacitus as having dark complexions and curly hair, were one such group).

But it is clear that the megalithic culture was a native European development and not an import from the Mediterranean.

Northwestern Europe was not the only region on which Indo-European warriors exerted a decisive influence. We shall soon follow their expeditions of conquest and culture-building into prehistoric Italy, Greece, and India.