Science: Anthropologists on Aryanism

When Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was rattling his sabre under the tremulous nose of France, a German professor stuck his finger into the dead corpus of the Sanskrit language and pulled out a word that was to kindle the fires of scientific controversy for many a long year to come. The word that Friedrich Maximilian Muller introduced to the Western world was Aryan, which in Sanskrit means nothing more than “noble.”

Scientifically the word Aryan refers to language rather than race. Some scholars in England applied it to the whole family of Indo-European languages but stricter philologists confined its use to one Indo-European branch—Sanskrit, Iranian, and their modern dialects in North India and Persia. Max Muller, though not at all out of sympathy with the budding doctrine of Aryanism in Germany, used the word with seemly caution. Born in Dessau in 1823 to a German poet and dissuaded from, attempting a musical career by Mendelssohn (his godfather), Max Muller studied Sanskrit, comparative philology, grew fond of metaphysics, went to Oxford in 1848 to supervise printing of his Rig-Veda translation, stayed in England the rest of his life, became a naturalized Briton, died at last, in the fullness of years and honors, in 1900.

In Germany, Max Muller’s new word sprouted in fertile soil and quickly got out of hand. A considerable body of German scholars not only gave Aryan the widest possible linguistic meaning, but applied it as a race-name to the primitives who spread over Europe from their unknown homeland. These learned men asserted that Indo-Europeans were fair-haired, blue-eyed, resembled in all ways the ideal German.

Then came the hoarse little housepainter, the rise of the Third Reich, the triumph of Nazi ideology. The word once to be found only in musty lexicons screamed from every morning’s newspaper. If the scientific underpinnings of Aryanism were flimsy, the fact was obscured in the dust of marching feet, the blare of bands, the drip of blood.

Last week in London two distinguished Britons uprose to demolish the “Aryan fallacy” once & for all. A thousand scientists were there from 42 countries to attend the Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. In the audience were Germans who sat in stony silence amid gales of applause.

Anthropologist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (Migrations of Early Culture, The Ancient Egyptians) led off by declaring that, although the Mediterranean race must be credited with the initial impetus toward civilization, the fact was due to circumstances rather than innate qualities of initiative or skill. Continued Sir Grafton: “It is a matter of some importance to emphasize this fact at a time when distinctive qualities of mind and character are being attributed to the Nordic race and the so-called Aryan people. Max Muller, in the face of intense criticism, was compelled to admit that an ethnologist who speaks of the ‘Aryan’ race, ‘Aryan’ blood or ‘Aryan’ eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.* Those who insist upon the moral and intellectual qualities of ‘Aryans’ and talk about primitive ‘Aryan’ culture should be reminded that it is more than doubtful that ‘Aryans’ did invent primitive culture in any other way than by borrowing from Babylonia. It becomes an increasing matter of surprise that the facts of anthropology should be so flagrantly misused at the present time by applying the word ‘Aryan’ as equivalent to non-Jewish.”

Said John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, geneticist, biochemist, science popularizer:

“On a knowledge of their ancestry we cannot yet say one man will and another will not be capable of reaching a given cultural standard. The so-called races within Europe have a dubious status. In respect of physical characters they overlap to a considerable extent. Within such a population a man of a given type—for example a Nordic with a long head of hair and blue eyes—is no more likely to have a high proportion of Scandinavian ancestry than a relative not possessing those characteristics. Nor is it yet possible to determine the proportions of ancestry in a given population which belonged to various hypothetical races in the past.”

Other noteworthy discussions at the Congress:

New Guinea Find— The frontiers of the known world were dramatically pushed back a little farther last week when E. W. Pearson Chinnery, Australian Government anthropologist, revealed his recent discovery of a “lost” tribe of 200,000 souls inhabiting an unexplored area of 5,000 sq. mi. in New Guinea.** The region is cradled between the towering Bismarck Mountains to the north and a nameless range to the south. Mr. Chinnery made a reconnaissance by airplane, expecting to find an unbroken wilderness of swamp and jungle, was amazed to discover a serene land of winding rivers and green meadows, checkerboarded here & there by neat vegetable gardens.

A second penetration on foot revealed the natives to be strong & sturdy blacks, better physical specimens than their fellow New Guineans. They were not unfriendly, although Mr. Chinnery had difficulty understanding them. And although tilling the soil is unknown or unpopular elsewhere in New Guinea, Mr. Chinnery’s new friends raise beans, potatoes, sugar cane, bananas. They enjoy a coolish, pleasant climate 5,000 to 6,000 ft. above sea level.

Antiquity of Man. No sane anthropologist asserts that man descended from an ape or monkey. The family tree of primates charted by Sir Arthur Keith shows New World monkeys branching off a common stem in the Eocene Age (2,000,000 years ago), Old World monkeys diverging later in the same period. In the Oligocene Age (1,200,000 years ago), the great upright primates reached a fork. One branch ends up with the gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees of today. The other continues steadily toward Homo sapiens.

After two years of research at Yale, Dr. Solly Zuckerman, Oxford zoologist, last week reported that the blood serum proteins of Old World monkeys are closer kin to the corresponding human proteins than to those of New World monkeys. Thus was Sir Arthur’s tree upheld in outline, but the discovery seemed to indicate that the Old World monkey branch should be moved up the main stem, farther from the New World monkey divergence, closer to the human fork.

*Dolichocephalic: long-skulled; phalic: short-skulled. **A Pacific island, north of Australia, east of Borneo.