EURASIAN

eurasian, a term originally confined to india, where for upwards of half a century it was used to denote children born of hindu mothers and european (especially portuguese) fathers. following the geographical employment of the word _eurasia_ to describe the whole of the great land mass which is divided into the continents of europe and asia, eurasian has come to be descriptive of any half-castes born of parents representing the races of the two continents. it has further an ethnological sense, a.h. keane (_ethnology_, 1896) proposing to find in the eurasian steppe the true home of the primitive aryan groups. joseph deniker (_anthropology_, 1900) makes a eurasian group to include such peoples (ugrians, turko-tatars, &c.) as are represented in both continents. giuseppe sergi, in his _mediterranean race_ (london, 1901), uses eurasiatic to denote that variety of man which "brought with it into europe (from asia in the later neolithic period) flexional languages of aryan or indo-european type."