Palla Ákos szerk.: Az Országos Orvostörténeti Könyvtár közleményei 30. (Budapest, 1964)

Dr. T. Tóth: The Principal Questions of Anthropological Taxonomy

climate. Here it is more important to know that humanity or rather every one of its races survived through all the social and economic developmental stages it created for itself, against every physical hardship (e. g., epidemics sweeping across an entire region). It is well-known that the Negroid and Mongoloid-Oceanic groups were not only attacked by such hardships as epidemics, but were reduced, and the Tasmanians extinguished, by the Europoids. Unfortunately this is also true about several South American indian tribes (e. g., the Tupinambas and Tupiniquins near the eastern coast of Brazil and the Onas of Tierra del Fuego). The zoological definition of race is inadequate for anthropology, pointing to the need for a taxonomical distinction of race in this field. On one hand it is undoubtable that the great races of humanity differ from one another in certain anthropologically-significant morphological features and pigmentation, but these are not at all significant for the over-all biological unity of mankind. On the other hand since upon the rise of Homo sapiens the formerly decisive biological laws become ineffective, i. e., among the formed and perfecting social relations, the general biological (macrostructural) state of humanity becomes permanent and the concept of race necessary for anthropological classification has to be modified and not discarded. Lesley Dunn actually refers to this in one of his new studies (1960) admitting that the modern biological view of race may not exclude the non-zoological, in other words, the anthropological, genetical or other interpretations of race. In reality the anthropological meaning of race is broader than the biological because it includes a social factor. Undeniably after the Upper Paleolithic the gret races of humanity were formed not only in the natural but also in the social environment (Bunak: 1938, 1956, 1958; Debetz: 1948a, 1956, 1958). It is also certain that the effect of natural surroundings (geographical isolation) is gradually reduced by the hybridization following the great migrations and social development. Although according to various modern studies the natural environment affects the human organism to a certain extent, this does not bring about new races. This observation was proved by the recent results of Pulianos (1960) obtained from the analysis of anthropological data collected from