Old American

Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, last year circled the earth peering intently into the faces of the people he encountered, scrutinizing their hair, their ears and jaws, their chins and cheekbones. When he returned last fall he remarked upon the strangeness of seeing "red Indians" in Asia, Negritos (a Philippine and African type), in India, yellow-haired and bearded women among black Australian aborigines. He is "a great one for remembering faces," a greater one for understanding, classifying them.

Last week Dr. Hrdlicka published the fruits of a long study of "Old American" faces. He had steered clear of inhabitants of the "inbred" New England and South Atlantic states and, since 1910, collected data on individuals descended from three and four generations of people that had lived in broader, but still wholly American, environments. Such people, "of well-determined, all-American ancestry," were much fewer than might have been supposed. But his studies extended to over 1,500 adults of both sexes, 937 being examined in detail.

His description of the Old American type thus evolved is quite unlike the European and comic-sheet conception of a thrust-jawed, loud-voiced, long-skulled Nordic "American." The Old American is not a Nordic type, in the first place. He retains the physical characteristics of his British ancestors, who were just as near an Alpine type as a Nordic.* He is mesocephalic (medium-skulled, between "long" and "round" or "short." He is tallest of all the large groups of white men. His hair is medium in color, rarely bright blond in adults, almost never black. His eyes tend to be "medium," that is, light brown rather than dark brown or bright blue. He is sinewy and slender in youth, not rawboned and gangling or fat and pudgy.

His behavior is characterized by frankness and energy. He is shrewd but not furtive. He is persistent rather than intense. He is not inclined to be sentimental; he avoids affectation. His nature seldom goes to extremes; that is, it seldom degenerates into the pervert, seldom rises above average to the genius. Interests that have attracted him with exceptional force, interests to which he has given himself most unreservedly, are only two: finance and religion. He is not notable as farmer, politician, soldier, artist or scientist.

*The third main stream or type of the white races is "Mediterranean", short, dark, brachycephalic.