Imagine your notebook surviving for centuries to be studied by historians. This happened to transcriptions by Nicholai Miklouho-Maclay, Russian of Ukrainian Cossack descent, of a palaeontology class delivered by Ernst Haeckel (1866) This unlikely record, captures the rise of race science in Germany🧵
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Below, a picture of the duo on a Canary Island expedition.
You see, Haeckel has interpreted paleontology to be a constant road to higher development, a goal-driven “perfection” of the organisms over time. Lending itself to hierarchy, in which he had seen Mittellanderm (Germanics) as evolutionary superior to others.
(Also, without context, I take "Mittelländer" to mean something like "Mediterranean", it doesn't carry any obvious connotations of German-ness to me.)