THE INDO - EUROPEAN HYPOTHESIS IN NINIETENTH CEINTURY PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Paul

In 1858 William Ripley recalled an important nineteenth century assumption: In our school d&ys most of us were brought up to regard Asia as the mother of European people. We were told that an ideal race of men swarmed forth from the Himalayan highlands, disseminating culture right and left as they spread through the barbarous West. The primitive language, parent of all the varieties of speech--Romance, Teutonic, Slavic, Persian, or Hindustanee--spoken by the so-called Caucasian or white race, was called Aryan. By inference, this name was shifted to the shoulders of the people themselves, who were known as the Aryan race.1 This assumption of Indian origins for modern Europeans is called the Indo-European, or Aryan hypothesis. I would like to trace its history, explain why it appealed to anthropologists, and show how it delayed their acceptance of evolution.2