caption death_date death_place birth_place image_size nationality field birth_date known_for image article_title name
giuseppe sergi october 17 , 1936 -lrb- aged 95 -rrb- rome messina 150px italian anthropology march 20 , 1841 biological anthropology gsergi.jpg giuseppe sergi
 giuseppe sergi
giuseppe sergi

giuseppe sergi -lrb- march 20 , 1841 -- october 17 , 1936 -rrb- was an influential italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century , best known for his opposition to nordicism in his books on the racial identity of ancient mediterranean peoples .
he rejected existing racial typologies that identified mediterranean peoples as `` dark whites '' because it implied a nordicist conception of mediterranean peoples descending from whites whom had become racially mixed with non-whites that he claimed was false .
his concept of the mediterranean race , identified mediterranean peoples as being an autonomous brown race and that the nordic race descended from the mediterranean race whose skin depigmented to a pale complexion after moving north .
this concept became important to the modelling of racial difference in the early twentieth century .
