- Alpine race
and Alpine.Bruce Baum, "The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: a political history of racial identity", NYU Press, 2006, pp.145, 147, ] A distinctive Alpine type had been proposed by earlier writers, but it was Ripley who promoted it to one of the main divisions.
Ripley argued that the Alpines had originated in Asia, and had spread westwards along with the emergence and expansion of agriculture, which they established in Europe. By migrating into central Europe, they had separated the northern and southern branches of the earlier European stock, creating the conditions for the separate evolution of Nordics and Mediterraneans. This model was repeated in
Madison Grant 's book "The Passing of the Great Race " (1916), in which the Alpines were portrayed as the most populous of European and western Asian races.In
Carleton Coon 's rewrite of Ripley's "The Races of Europe", he developed the argument that they were reducedUpper Paleolithic survivors indigenous to Europe. Coon argued that they were linked to their unreduced (Brunn, Borreby) counterparts.Despite the large numbers of this alleged race, the characteristics of the Alpines were not as widely discussed and disputed as those of the Nordics and Mediterraneans. Typically they were portrayed as "sedentary": solid peasant stock, the reliable backbone of the European population, but not outstanding for qualities of leadership or creativity.
The concept of a distinctive Alpine race is no longer generally used within physical anthropology, as genetics are currently regarded as the correct way to classify ethnic groups.
References
ee also
*
Nordic race
*Nordish race
*Mediterranean race
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