Joseph Deniker's map of European races (1899) identified "Dinarics" as the dominant group in parts of central Europe, Northern Italy and the northwestern Balkans.
Several pseudoscientific theories were advanced regarding the genesis of the Dinaric race. Most[which?] researchers agreed that this race was autochthonous to its present habitat from the Neolithic period. Both Günther and Coon claimed that the Bell-Beaker people of the European Bronze Age were at least partially Dinaric.[citation needed]
Coon also argued, however, in The Origin of Races (1962), that the Dinaric and some other categories "are not races but simply the visible expressions of the genetic variability of the intermarrying groups to which they belong."
He referred to the creation of this distinctive phenotype from the mixing of earlier separate groups as "dinaricisation". In his view Dinarics were a specific type that arose from ancient mixes of the Mediterranean race and Alpine race.
The Noric race (German: Norische Rasse) was a racial category proposed by the anthropologist Victor Lebzelter. The "Noric race" was supposed to be a sub-type of the Dinaric race more Nordic in appearance than standard Dinaric peoples.[6] The term derived from Noricum, a province of the Roman Empire roughly equivalent to southern Austria and northern Slovenia. The term is not to be confused with Nordic. [7]