Ural Altaic Race

Ural-Altaic Race (Mongolo-Tatars), one of the main branches of the Mongolic or Yellow division of mankind. Although purely geographical and defective, the Ural and Altai ranges being far from covering the whole area, the expression Ural-Altaic is to be preferred to Mongolo-Tatar, which is both defective and inaccurate, in fact, tautological, Mongol and Tatar being, strictly speaking, synonymous ethnical terms. There are four well-marked groups-- the Tungus and Manchus of North-East Asia as far west as the Yenisei and the south to the Amur basin; the Mongols of Central Asia (Mongolia, Baikalia, parts of Tibet), with an outlying group in European Russia (Lower Volga); the Turks, improperly called "Taters," of Western Asia, the Balkan Peninsula, Caucasia, and parts of European Russia; the Finns (with the Lapps and Samoyedes) of North-East Europe and North Siberia as far east as the Yenisei. Excluding the Koreans and Japanese, doubtful members of the family, and the Bulgarians and Magyars of Hungary, originally Finno-Turks, but now assimilated to the Caucasic type, these various branches of the Ural-Altaic race occupy an area of not less than 10,000,000 square miles, with a total population of about 50,000,000, of whom 30,000,000 are Turks, 13,000,000 Finns, 5,000,000 Mongols, and 2,000,000 Tungus and Manchus. Going to secular intermingling was with the peoples of the west (Iranians and Europeans of Aryan speech), the Western groups represent almost every shade of transition between the Mongolic and Caucasic types; but the fundamental unity of the races established both by their common Ural-Altaic speech and by a few salient physical traits, such as a yellowish complexion, black lank hair, small slant eyes, somewhat flat features, brachycephalic (round) head, short stature, generally below the European average. Amongst many of the Finnish and Turkish groups these traits have been almost obliterated by miscegenation, so that it is extremely difficult to draw the line between Mongol and Caucasian about the ethnical borderlands.