Dinaric Race - Origin and Distribution

Origin and Distribution

Several theories were advanced regarding the genesis of the Dinaric race. Most researchers agreed that this race was autochthonous to its present habitat from the Neolithic period. Both Günther and Coon claimed that the Bell-Beaker people of the European Bronze Age were at least partially Dinaric.

Coon also argued, however, in The Origin of Races (1962), that the Dinaric and some other categories "are not races but simply the visible expressions of the genetic variability of the intermarrying groups to which they belong."

He referred to the creation of this distinctive phenotype from the mixing of earlier separate groups as "dinaricisation". In his view Dinarics were a specific type that arose from ancient mixes of the Mediterranean race and Alpine race.

According to the Dinaric model, Dinarics were to be found in the mountainous areas of the western Balkans: Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Slovenia, Austria, part of northwestern Bulgaria, and northwestern Republic of Macedonia).

Northern and Eastern Italy was considered mostly a Dinaric area as well as western Greece, Romania, western Ukraine, southeastern German-speaking areas, and parts of southern Poland and southeastern France.