Eurasian

Eurasian, a term originally confined to India, where for upwards of half a century it was used to denote children born of Hindu mothers and European (especially Portuguese) fathers. Following the geographical employment of the word Eurasia to describe the whole of the great land mass which is divided into the continents of Europe and Asia, Eurasian has come to be descriptive of any half-castes born of parents representing the races of the two continents. It has further an ethnological sense, A.H. Keane (Ethnology, 1896) proposing to find in the Eurasian Steppe the true home of the primitive Aryan groups. Joseph Deniker (Anthropology, 1900) makes a Eurasian group to include such peoples (Ugrians, Turko-Tatars, &c.) as are represented in both continents. Giuseppe Sergi, in his Mediterranean Race (London, 1901), uses Eurasiatic to denote that variety of man which “brought with it into Europe (from Asia in the later Neolithic period) flexional languages of Aryan or Indo-European type.”

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