Uriah

Practically anything I have written about the broad faced people of Europe and the Middle East is true, maybe doubly true, of East Asians who also traditionally practiced collectivized agriculture. You can think of Alpines as “domesticated”, but also as “Orientalized”.

So what then it is like to be wild, at least by European standards? The best illustration would be the pathological shyness of Norwegians, who have a way of filling up a bus one by one while always maintaining the maximum possible distance between passengers.

But the people of British Isles are also quite long headed and not quite the same and Iberians are downright extraverted . The common element between them is a softness toward children and animals, an easy going laziness: a philosophy of “that’s just like, your opinion, man”

They wander and emigrate more than Alpines, easily feel cramped and stifled by monotony. They indulge themselves in flights of fantasy; they wander mentally as well as physically. They speak theatrically, “idealistically” They do not take orders well.

There are three clusters of people in Europe that produce large numbers of great distance runners: 1. Norway 2. Iberia and 3. Britain, especially Wales. The universal pattern, in Europe or in Africa, is that people who raise animals in hills, like the Kalenjin, can run for days.

There is essentially a trade off: active human societies of hunters, herders, or isolated farmers maintain strong lungs, primarily I think to survive respiratory infections. When life becomes sedentary and stressful cortisol no longer pays for itself.