Note 490 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

As a rule it is the new-comers who hold the coast, but occasionally the coast-dwellers represent the older ethnic stock. In the Balkan Peninsula to-day the descendants of the ancient Hellenes are, with few exceptions, confined to the coast. The reason is to be found in the fact that the Slavs and other northern races who have intruded by successive invasions from the plains of southern Russia are primarily inland peoples, and therefore have occupied the core of the peninsula, forcing the original Greek population before them to the edge of the sea.490 This is the same anthropo-geographical process which makes so many peninsulas the last halting-place of a dislodged earlier race. But the Greeks who line the northern and western shores of Asiatic Turkey are such only in language and religion, because their prevailing broad head-form shows them to be Turks and Armenians in race stock.491