Democritus Reformatorium Prehistoric Tribes

The paragenetic model of prehistory presupposes that most hominins and hominids lived in relative interbreeding and their genetic distances were much nearer than now. What we denote as detached genera and species were actually interfertile genetic races, strains, lineages, crosses and hybrids that later lost mutual interfertility owing to isolation in different hominoid populations. It is not plausible that they developed by large jumps from one genus to another, they must have maintained and preserved their genetic pool through progressive evolutionary metamorphoses. Many categories of genus and species were only generations, so the extant binomial and trinomial anthropological classification should adopt a special term for transient generations. All strains underwent parallel processes of hominisation, gracilisation and sapientisation by means of radical revolutions and longer stages of conservative inertia. Hominins split off hominids and hominoids as a special genetic stream competing with alternative strains of Paranthropines and Australopithecines. Participation in different population strains caused intraspecial differentiation. In the following evolutionary series the symbol means digression while the arrow → implies genetic continuity. It does not mean direct mother-daugher inheritance but a complex statistic process with many digressions splitting off the dominant mainstream. The following series are chief statistic mainstreams that suggest that the Palaeolithic Urrassen had different ancestors but converged to one of predominant Neolithic racial varieties.

Tall robust dolichocephalous herbivores with marked crista sagittalis

Gigantopithecus (9 mya) → Ouranopithecus (9 mya) ( Gorillas (9 mya)) → Paranthropus aethiopicus (2.5 mya) ( Paranthropus robustus (2 mya)) → Australopithecus garhi (2.5 mya) → Australopithecus sediba (1.8 mya) → Homo gautengensis (1.8 mya) → Homo erectus (1.8 mya) → Oldowans (1.8 mya).

Slender piscivores with tall and leptoprosopic flattish faces:

Proconsul africanus (23 mya) → Kenyanthropus platyops (3.5 mya) → Australopithecus afarensis (3.9–2.9 mya) → Homo habilis (2.1–1.5 mya) → Homo rudolfensis (2–1.5 mya) → Levalloisians (0.5 mya).

Tall brachycephalous carnivores and big-game hunters with narrow aquiline noses

Australopithecus anamensis (4.5 mya) → Laetoli man → Homo heidebergensis → Homo rhodensis (0.5 mya) ( Saldanha man) → Homo neanderthalensis → Mousterians.

Shortsized brachycephalous omnivores:

Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 mya) → Ardipithecus kadabba ( Pan paniscus (Bonobo)) → Australo-pithecus afarensis (3.9 mya) → Homo habilis → Sanids → Pygmids ( Homo floresiensis) → Sinids.

Table 1. The paragenetic model of racial diversification

The Folktale Typology of Prehistoric Races

The great import of popular folktales to systematic racial taxonomy consists in an explicit testimony and identification of the source-to-target ethnic perspective. Prehistoric lore anticipated the science of modern anthropology by sketching a sort of fantastic monsterology that perceived foreign tribes as unnatural beings. Considering their types from the viewpoint of modern narratology, we should speak of a field of comparative fictional characterology as a discipline giving natural anthropological interpretations to superstitious fictions. Our prehistoric forebears viewed Lappids as tiny elves and dwarfs, giant Basco-Ugrids as cannibalic ogres, Turcoid cave-dwellers and pirates as dragons, Sarmatoid raiders as lycanthropic werewolves and vampires and tall Nordic Goths as lazy silly Jacks. Foreign warriors were feared as animal monsters because they made raids in totemistic disguise.

Every prehistoric race had its own specific animal heroes, feared inimical predators and folktale types. Animal trickster tales indulged in elfin heroes and can be described by a simple formula: ‘an elfin animal hero outwits a silly giant animal’. In ogrish tales the central monstrous figure is the ogre or ogress conceived as an unnatural being with cannibalistic dispositions. However, their narrative perspective fulfils the formula ‘en elfin girl escapes the threat of devouring by an ogrish cannibal’, so their more accurate name should read ‘anti-ogrish tales’. If we clean the story of The Little Red Riding-Hood of improper later associations with horse-riding sports, it may be seen as an elfin-to-lycanthrope archetype as red hoods were peculiar to fairy-tale dwarfs and medieval coxcombs, while lycanthropy and wolfine totemism pertained to beliefs of Sarmatian raiders. It simply described the social clashes of the autochthonous Alpines besieged by assaults of Hallstattian invaders of Sarmatian origin.

Tales about ogres form the most core of narratives denoted as fairy tales. Fairies are usually described as supernatural beings that lure humans to follow them to water depths or to forest thickets. Their appearance and social customs differed according to sex, age and degree of civilisation. Their majority belonged to female forestial or waterside creatures as their folktale motifs referred to women who sojourned in caves and later in waterside hill forts. They were built on inaccessible high rocky promontories towering over river streams and mentioned in folktales as wizards’ castles. Their ramparts served as a winter base for herdsmen, who departed every spring with their herds of cattle and grazed them in mountainous pastures over summer. During their spring expeditions they dwelt in light portable tents, while their wives and kids lived on a limited supply provided by the animal and human catch.

Monster type	Prehistoric nationality
male elves	brachycephalic Furfooz, Ofnet and Alpine race in Europe
elf, dwarf, álfar, dvergar Irish leprechauns goblins vanír	Alpines, Lapplanders, Drevane tribes of British Albion and Scottish Albania Gauls, Gaels Vends, Antes, Finns
Melusine	a prototype of the Snow White and elfin heroines
Nordic giants	Europoid tall dolichocephalic agriculturalists
giants, Jotun, jötnar der dumme Hans	Goths, Jutes, Nordics homely youths of Europoid peasantry
giant cyclopes	Megalith tribes of tall brachycephalic Dinaric race
cyclopes amazons Slavic bies, bisytsia ogres, ogresses	Scythoid Mycenaeans, Mysii Scythoid Masagetes, Mushkoi, Moesians Scythoid Bessi, Abazins, Abkhaz Ugrians, Ingrians, Varangians, Scots, Basques
female waterside fairies	Uralids & Sarmatids living in waterside hillforts
Slavic rusalka Slavic jezinka Slavic vila, wiła Slavic mara, Morena	Sarmatian Roxolanoi, Aorsi Sarmatian Ossetes, Osi, Oscans Sarmatoid Volcae, Wallachians, Welsh Sarmatoid Norici, Marharii, Ossetic Nartes
male lycanthropes	Sarmatoid pastoralists and nocturnal raiders
werewolves, vampires	Sarmatoid Volcae, Wallachian and Welsh herdsmen
water monsters	slender leptosomous race of Mediterranid fishers
dragons Typhon, Tiamat, titans Chimaera	Taurisci, Tyrrhenes, Titanes, Teutons Cimbri, Kimmeroi, Kimbern

Table 9. Supernatural beings and ethnic stocks in European folktales

Their tribal identity can be deciphered easily from their monsterological description drafted out in tales. The supernatural creatures of the Slavonic fairies rusalka, jezinka or yezinka, mara or vila show a conspicuous relationship to the Sarmatian tribes of Roxolanoi, Ossetes, Marharii and Volcae, who invaded Europe in several waves. The first wave consisted of Uralian hunters with the Comb Ware, while the second wave spread with the influx of Sarmatian herdsmen with horse-drawn chariots. They arrived in the Danube Basin about 800 BC as torch-bringers of the Hallstatt civilisation famed for chariot-burials. Their proverbial appetite for raids, cattle-theft, taking captives and building wizards’ (shaman’s) castles gave rise to stories about abductions, captives, fugitives, ogres, werewolves, witches, vampires, fairies and mermaids.

Genuine fairy tales concerned only nymphs and fairies that seemed to be the least dangerous of the whole band. Their festival Walpurgisnacht was celebrated by nightly dances in Germany and Uralian countries on the 30^th April as the All Witches’ Day. The Germanic female witches Valkiries and Russian shamans Volchove belonged to the Uralic phratry engaged in shamanic rites devoted to adoring Veles, the lord of the underworld Valhalla. Greater menace was yet scented from their male counterparts, who assailed and plundered village settlements. When they set out on wandering with their herds of cattle in spring, they interspersed their grazing with night-time raids on farmers’ hamlets. They put on masks with wolfish heads and furs, disguised as werewolves and looted farmers’ abodes to steal corn and rape their women. Werewolves were reported in lycanthropic tales as somnambulant creatures who lived like men by day and transformed to wolves by night. They assaulted their victims’ carotid artery and sipped their blood. Their favourite customs comprised bloodletting, opening veins of their cattle and drinking its blood. Beside cattle-theft and cattle-holding they practiced also man-holding, i.e. they took their human victims as captives, forced them to work as slaves and subdued them also to bloodletting. These ritual practices gave rise to accusations of lycanthropy and vampirism.

Lycanthropic myths mention a number of typical Uralian and Sarmatian customs: lupine totem cults, night-time looting raids upon rural communities, wearing masks made of wolfish heads and furs, blood-letting and blood-sipping, impaling enemies on stakes or posts of palisades, killing them by stabbing their heart with a wooden pole etc. Moreover, the folklore of Sarmatian male warriors included drinking intoxicating beverages (kumys, ale, Vedic soma, Iranian haoma), tossing bones and dice for scapulomantic divination, reciting heroic sagas and songs with the accompaniment of string instruments. Their festivals were remarkable for sword dances called Morisken-tanz in Germany, Moorish or Morris dances in Britain and moreshka in Croatia. In the Balkans their warriors stepped a similar male dance with whiffling swords called rusalia. Their names suggest etymology descending from principal Uralic and Sarmatic ethnonyms. Morris dances did not allude to Moors and Saracenes but to the Hallstattian colonists called Marharii (Moravians), Marcomanni, Norici and Italian Marsi. The Slavic vila or wiła hinted at the Hallstattian shamanistic tribe of Volcae.

At the stage of Mesolithic hunters the Uralian and Sarmatian tribes spent severe winters in waterproof caves. Their shelter was peculiar also to fairies yezinkas in the Slavonic tales about the little Rosin-boy.1 They besought him to open the door because of severe frost, and when he took mercy on them, they kidnapped him away from his guardian stag’s abode. They featured as miserable man-eating cannibalistic beings living as ogresses. One related type of the ogresses yezinkas looked like the old hag Baba Yaga dwelling in a hut on chicken feet, which was a clear hint at waterside post-dwellings of Tungusoid fishermen’s tribes. Such ogresses must have led a sad lonely life in the wilderness like hermits. When Altaic tribes had to spend a severe cold winter in starvation, they used to oust the over-aged elders from their home and sent them to die alone in the woods. Such forms of forcible or voluntary hermitage made these retirees improve their poor bill of fare by kidnapping children that had gone astray in the forest and roast them in the oven.

Unnatural cannibalistic practices in ogrish tales had a natural explanation in savage hunters’ life. Every folktale type had a male, female and juvenile version telling a different story. Warriors, women and children looked at their clan’s ritual practices from a different angle of view but participated in one collective economic process of tribal subsistence. Folkloristic analysis of folktales must see through diverse viewpoints, put together seeming inseparables and integrate alternative versions into one common type of fabulas. After removing inorganic later additions and generalising local mutations it is possible to reveal the common prehistoric core. Scythoid big-game hunters tended to worship a feline totem but their colonists adapted its appearance to local species of feline beasts of prey. African megalith-builders prayed to lions and sphinges, their Asiatic relatives to tigers (weretigers) and Quechuan megalith clans in Peru adored jaguars. Such a revision of folktale motif-indices allows us to outline their systematic taxonomy and excavate the long-forgotten Palaeolithic raceology.

Extract from P. Bělíček: The Synthetic Classification of Human Phenotypes and Varieties Prague 2018, p. 25-27

1 One of variants is the tale Grandfather's Eyes: The Story of Three Wicked Yezinkas, in: Parker Fillmore: Czechoslovak Fairy Tales. The Quinn & Boden, N. J., 1919.