Theodor Poesche


Theodor Friedrich Wilhelm Poesche was a German American anthropologist and author, specializing in historical anthropology.

Life

Born in 1825 in Zoeschen in the Province of Saxony of the Kingdom of Prussia, Poesche became a
student of philosophy at the University of Halle and later a revolutionary. After the counterrevolution in 1850, he emigrated to the United States. In 1853, he published The New Rome, or The United States of the World, a book in which he compares the United States to the Roman Empire.
In 1878, he published The Aryans: A contribution to historical anthropology. Based on the physical characteristics attributed to Indo-Europeans by the philologist Ludwig Geiger, Poesche placed the origin of the Aryans in the vast Rokitno Marshes, then in the Russian Empire, now covering much of the southern part of Belarus and the north-west of Ukraine, where albinism was common. Similarly, he argued that the Lithuanian language is as near to the parent language of Indo-European as Sanskrit. Adding linguistic and archaeological arguments, Karl Penka later expanded the area of origin to include northern Germany and Scandinavia.
Poesche died in Washington on 27 December 1899.

Works