Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as
representatives of Aryan language and culture."
According to Grant, the "Alpine race", shorter in stature, darker in colouring, with a rounder head,
predominated in Central and Eastern Europe through to Turkey and the Eurasian steppes of Central
Asia and Southern Russia. The "Mediterranean race", with dark hair and eyes, aquiline
nose, swarthy complexion, moderate-to-short stature, and moderate or long skull was said to be
prevalent in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Only in the 1920s did a strong partiality for "Nordic" begin to reveal itself, and for a while the term was
used almost interchangeably with Aryan. Later, however, Nordic would not be co-terminous with Aryan,
Indo-European or Germanic. For example, the later Nazi minister for Food, Richard Walther Darré, who
had developed a concept of the German peasantry as a Nordic race, used the term 'Aryan' to refer to
the tribes of the Iranian plains.
In Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People), published 1922, Hans F. K.
Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding the East Baltic race (related to
the Alpine race) and Dinaric race (related to the Nordic race) to Ripley's categories. This work was
influential in Ewald Banse's publication of Die Rassenkarte von Europa in 1925 which combined research
by Deniker, Ripley, Grant, Otto Hauser, Günther, Eugen Fischer and Gustav Kraitschek.
Carleton S. Coon (1939)
Carleton S. Coon in his book of 1939 The Races of Europe subdivided the Nordic race into three main
types, "Corded", "Danubian" and "Hallstatt", besides a "Neo-Danubian" type and a variety of Nordic
types altered by Upper Palaeolithic or Alpine admixture. Types found in "places distant from the present
northwestern European center of Nordic concentration" that he determined to be morphologically
Nordic, were called "Exotic Nordics".
Coon took the Nordics to be a partially depigmented branch of the greater Mediterranean racial
stock. This theory was also supported by Coon's mentor Earnest Albert Hooton, who in the same year
published Twilight of Man , which stated: "The Nordic race is certainly a depigmented offshoot from the
basic long-headed Mediterranean stock. It deserves separate racial classification only because its blond
hair (ash or golden), its pure blue or grey eyes".
Coon suggested that the Nordic type emerged as a result of a mixture of "the Danubian Mediterranean
strain with the later Corded element". Hence his two main Nordic types show Corded and Danubian
predominance, respectively. A third "Hallstatt" type Coon took to have emerged in the European Iron
Age, in Central Europe, where he said that it was subsequently mostly replaced, but "found a refuge in
Sweden and in the eastern valleys of southern Norway."
Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime, and are considered pseudoscientific in
modern anthropology.