The model of evolution developed by Charles Darwin increasingly gained traction, bringing about a revolution in scientific thinking. It was now clear that natural and human history were interlinked.
What did this mean for how people imagined the North? Had the time come to reevaluate the region’s role in prehistory? Could it be that the northern peoples and their cultures had emerged independently from those elsewhere?
Based on the wealth of new knowledge, the idea of a long Germanic prehistory seemed worthy of closer examination. And regardless of whether the origins of the northern cultures were attributed to the North itself or to India or Persia, many researchers now considered belief in the biblical story of creation—scorned by some as “Jewish fables”—to be out of date. No one could imagine what the consequences this shift in thinking would have.
The idea that White people originated in the Caucasus, which in the nineteenth century was closely entwined with the question of the genesis of the Germanic peoples, was first formulated by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In 1776, he used the term Caucasian to refer to those peoples who were “predominantly white in color” and, in his eyes, most beautiful.
[Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from the book Extreme North: A Cultural History by Bernd Brunner.]