<P> Hans Egede Saabye, a Danish priest and botanist, spent 1770 - 1778 in Greenland . His diaries, published in 1816 and translated into several European languages, contained much ethnographic information . He described the spot on newborns, saying he had seen it often when the infants were presented naked for baptism . A second Danish observer was doctor and zoologist Daniel Frederik Eschricht, mainly based in Copenhagen . In 1849 he wrote of the "mixed" babies he had delivered at the lying - in hospital . He also says that "the observation made for the first time by Saabye about Inuit children has been completely confirmed by Captain Holbøll", who sent him a fetus pickled in alcohol . </P> <P> Gessain goes on to state that it was only in 1883 that an anthropologist mentions the spot . It was Erwin Bälz, a German working in Tokyo, who described a dark blue mark on Japanese infants . He presented his findings in 1901 in Berlin, and from that point on, Bälz's name was associated with certain skin cells containing pigment . Captain Gustav Frederik Holm wrote in 1887 that his Greenlandic interpreter Johannes Hansen (known as Hanserak) attested to the existence of the birthmark over the kidney region of newborns, which grows larger as they grow older . That year, the Danish anthropologist Soren Hansen drew the connection between the observations of Bälz in Japan and Saabye in Greenland . "This cannot be a coincidence . It is not the first time that the resemblance between the Japanese and the Eskimo has been pointed out ." Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, said that the spot was widespread in the mixed Danish - Inuit population of West Greenland . Soren Hansen confirmed this, and further hypothesized that in both Japan and Greenland the spot might indicate an African connection ("a sign of direct descent from a black racial element"). (See Historical race concepts .) A missionary in Bethel, Alaska, a traditional gathering place of Yup'ik people, reported that the spots were common on children . Rudolf Trebitsh, an Austrian linguist and ethnologist, spent the summer of 1906 on the West Coast of Greenland, and listed all the examples he came across . Gessain went to north Labrador in 1926, looking for children with these spots . In 1953 Dr Saxtorph, medical advisor to the Greenland department (part of the Danish government), wrote that the Greenlanders do not like outsiders to see or discuss these birthmarks; "they doubtless feel as a reminiscence of the time when they lived on a low cultural level". </P> <P> The presence or absence of the Mongolian spot was used by racial theorists such as Joseph Deniker (1852 - 1918), the French anthropologist . </P> <P> The Journal of Cutaneous Diseases Including Syphilis, Volume 23 contained several accounts of the Mongolian spot on children in the Americas: </P>

Why do babies have a red mark on their forehead