Chapter VIII: The Results of Caesar’s Invasions of Britain (2)

3. Are we to count the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain among our ancestors? ‘I do not consider,’ says Dr. Garson, ‘that there is any evidence of the existence of the direct descendants of Palaeolithic man among the osteological remains of Neolithic or subsequent date in Britain.’[1577] On the other hand, Dr. Beddoe[1578] thinks that the oldest inhabitants of this country may have left descendants, whom he is inclined to identify with ‘some Mongoloid race’, traces of which, he believes, are discernible in the population of the west of England; while two distinguished French anthropologists, MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy, affirm that the Neanderthal race ‘has left a permanent imprint on the population of the three kingdoms’,[1579] and refer to various skulls of the Neolithic and later periods which resemble more or less closely that of Neanderthal.[1580] Moreover, it is generally admitted that even at the present day a few individuals here and there belong to the same type.[1581] But it does not follow that these persons or those to whom Dr. Beddoe and M. Hamy refer were descended from men who lived in Britain in the Palaeolithic Age. That palaeolithic man left no descendants in any part of the world is of course not maintained even by the most ardent supporters of the theory of the ‘Hiatus’: somewhere or other there must have been a link; but Sir John Evans, as I have observed in the first part of this book,[1582] argues from the supposed absence of intermediate forms of implements that it did not exist in this country; and Dr. Keane[1583] thinks that ‘the few scattered palaeolithic hunters could scarcely have lived through the last ice-age in a contracted region at one time reduced by subsidence to a mere cluster of islets’, &c. The answer is, first that there is no reason to believe that in ‘the last ice-age’ or at any time between the dawn of the latest palaeolithic period and the arrival of neolithic man Britain was ‘a mere cluster of islets’;[1584] and secondly that, as Professor Boyd Dawkins assures us, out of forty-eight species of mammalian fauna living in Britain in the Palaeolithic, thirty-one survived in the Neolithic Age.[1585] Professor Boyd Dawkins, however, insists that ‘the mere contrast between the Palaeolithic and wild Neolithic faunas implies a zoological break of the first magnitude’.[1586] I take leave to say that it implies no break at all, seeing that thirty-one of the older species confessedly lived on: it implies no more than is implied by the disappearance of the urus, the wolf, the wild boar, and many other animals which were living in this island at a time since which it has been continuously inhabited by man. The professor triumphantly points out that in those caves which were successively used as dwellings by palaeolithic and neolithic people ‘the remains of the domestic animals are found _alone_ in the upper Prehistoric [or neolithic] strata.’[1587] Undoubtedly. But what then? The fact does not prove that palaeolithic man had become extinct when neolithic man arrived: it merely proves that the latter had domestic animals, and that the former had not. Arab horses, Siamese cats, and many other animals have been introduced into this country since the Christian era: yet the people who were here before their introduction did not become extinct. And if ‘in a great many cases the lower Palaeolithic strata [in caves] are sealed down, and mapped off from the Neolithic, by a layer of stalagmite’,[1588] that only proves ‘a break of continuity between the two periods’ as far as those caves are concerned. The Palaeolithic Age, says the professor, ‘was continental, the Neolithic insular in North-Western Europe.’[1589] He means that in the Palaeolithic Age Great Britain was an outlying part of the Continent, and that the neolithic invaders had to sail across the Channel.[1590] But why should the formation of the Channel have extinguished the palaeolithic race? ‘There is obviously,’ continues the professor, ‘a great gulf fixed between the rude hunter civilisation of the one and the agricultural and pastoral civilisation of the other.’ Obviously. But the gulf is not more obvious than that which separated the civilization of the Red Indians from the civilization of the Pilgrim Fathers. Yet the Red Indians still lived on.

It is true that if the professor has failed to show that the Palaeolithic Age in Britain was abruptly terminated, he has no difficulty in disposing of certain arguments which have been adduced to show that it was not. When, for instance, Mr. Allen Brown points to the implements of palaeolithic type which were found in the refuse heaps of the neolithic settlement at Cissbury in Sussex, he replies that ‘in the vast accumulation of refuse, representing every style in the chipping, from the rough block of flint ... to the highly finished axe, broken ... by an unhappy blow, it is obvious that there must be some which would represent well-known Palaeolithic types.’[1591] Nevertheless it remains true that not one of the facts which he has stated is inconsistent with the hypothesis that men may have lived on in Britain in the palaeolithic stage of culture until the time when the first neolithic immigrants arrived. What his opponents suggest is that certain types of palaeolithic implements survived into the Neolithic Age;[1592] in other words, that implements of those types continued to be manufactured or used then. That this was the case in Ireland is certain;[1593] and, since there is no evidence of a Palaeolithic Age in Ireland, it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that they were made by descendants of palaeolithic refugees from Britain or Gaul. Mr. Allen Brown may be wrong in maintaining that implements which he has found ‘at or near the surface’ at East Dean in Sussex are ‘mesolithic’, that is, belong to a period of transition;[1594] but Sir John Evans himself says[1595] of some of the implements, usually classed as palaeolithic, which have been found in the cave earth of the famous Kent’s Cavern in a position which authorizes us to assume that the people to whom they belonged were not separated by any ‘hiatus’ from the palaeolithic race whose remains were found immediately underneath, that ‘so far as form is concerned, there is little or nothing to distinguish them from the analogous implements of the Neolithic Period’. Is it not possible that these and some of the ruder implements which have hitherto been classed as neolithic may have been fabricated not by neolithic immigrants but, after their immigration, by descendants of the palaeolithic race?[1596] Those who deny that mesolithic implements have been found in Britain deny also that they have been found anywhere else. Granted for the sake of argument. But if their general absence does not weaken the certainty that the supposed hiatus was not universal, how can their absence in Britain prove that there was a hiatus here? In Part I I have shown that it is impossible to frame any theory which shall account satisfactorily for the assumed disappearance of British palaeolithic man. Professor Boyd Dawkins asks us to believe that the ‘Cave-men’ fled in terror before the neolithic invaders and eventually settled in Greenland, where they became the ancestors of the Eskimos; and in support of this theory he assures us that ‘Palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe along with them, and disappeared with them’; that the gloves of the ‘Cave-men’ were ‘similar to those now used by the Eskimos’; that their implements ‘are of the same kind as those of the Eskimos’; that, like the Eskimos, they did not take the trouble to bury their dead; and that ‘the most astonishing bond of union between the Cave-men and the Eskimos is the art of representing animals’.[1597] Judging from the specimens of Eskimo art which the professor gives, I confess that what I find astonishing is its inferiority to that of the Cave-men;[1598] there is no evidence that the Cave-men of Britain wore gloves; and if they did, may not the reason have been, not that there was any connexion between them and the Eskimos, but that their hands were cold? Is the professor sure that ‘the River-drift men’ did not also wear gloves? We do not know whether palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia: he certainly did not accompany them from the north; and it is an article of faith with French anthropologists that he did not disappear with them, but became the ancestor of neolithic man. There is a general resemblance between the palaeolithic drift implements of all countries; and in the earlier part of this volume many facts have been noted which show how cautious one should be in inferring identity of race from similarity in implements, weapons, or ornaments. There is not the slightest evidence that ‘the Cave-men’ did not bury their dead; and there is irrefragable evidence, as we have seen, that cave-men in the Riviera and in Croatia did.[1599] Again, since the professor differentiates the ‘Cave-men’ from the ‘River-drift men’ of Britain, can he prove that the latter did bury their dead? If not, what becomes of his argument? Finally, the theory that the Eskimos are descendants of ‘the Cave-men’ of Western Europe has been rejected by every recent inquirer.[1600]

How does Professor Boyd Dawkins account for the disappearance, which he assumes, of palaeolithic man? ‘Simply,’ he says, ‘by assuming that at the close of the Pleistocene age, when they came into contact with Neolithic invaders, there were the same feelings between them as existed in Hearne’s times between the Eskimos and the Red Indian, terror and defenceless hatred being, on the one side, met by ruthless extermination on the other. In this way the Cave-men would be gradually driven from Europe.’[1601] That men who were ruthlessly exterminated should have survived to become the ancestors of the Eskimos is certainly remarkable. But seriously I would ask the professor whether he has really succeeded in persuading himself that ‘the Cave-men’ were one and all either exterminated or driven out of Europe. Did none remain? He assures us that ‘the Cave-men’ migrated eastward; and he still insists, in defiance of all French craniologists, that ‘neither of the two races of Palaeolithic man have left behind any marks in the existing population of Europe’.[1602] How they contrived to make their slow progress across the Continent without leaving one descendant is a problem which he does not attempt to solve. And since he himself admits, or rather affirms, that they ‘came into contact with Neolithic invaders’, it is difficult to see how he can maintain the existence of a hiatus.

The professor has asserted that there is ‘no evidence in any part of the world of a continuity between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic ages’.[1603] Yet he of course admits that it must have existed somewhere. Good reasons have been given for believing that it existed in France.[1604] Why not also in Britain?[1605]

Such are the reasons by which I endeavour to justify myself in refusing to believe that neolithic man, when he entered Britain, found none to welcome or to oppose him save the thirty-one species of mammalian fauna which Professor Boyd Dawkins has spared.

V. THE PYGMIES (?)

British pygmies are the creation of Celtic imagination. The evidence on which we are required to believe that they existed is this. Professor Rhys[1606] suggests that the name of the Coritani, a tribe mentioned by Ptolemy,[1607] who inhabited the country between the Trent and the Nen, is related to the word _cor_, a dwarf. ‘Then,’ the professor concludes, ‘we should have accordingly to suppose the old race to have survived so long and in such numbers that the Celtic lords of Southern Britain called the people of that area by a name meaning dwarfs.’ Afterwards, referring to various articles by Mr. David MacRitchie, he observes that in certain parts of Wales and Scotland there are mounds enclosing cells, which are ‘frequently so small as to prove beyond doubt that those who inhabited them were of remarkably small stature’;[1608] and he finds in Welsh, Irish, and Scotch folk-lore traditions which confirm him in the belief that these cells were inhabited by dwarfs, whom he calls ‘the Mound Folk’. ‘This strange people,’ he tells us, ‘seems to have exercised on the Celts ... a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness and awe stretching to the verge of adoration ... the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration, combined with his incapacity to comprehend the weird and uncanny population of the mounds and caves ... has enabled him ... to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs,’[1609] &c. The professor’s conclusion[1610] is that the earliest people who inhabited these islands [apparently after the Palaeolithic Age] were ‘the mound folk, consisting of the short swarthy people variously caricatured by our fairy tales’; and that they were conquered by neolithic invaders, who, he tells us, ‘made slaves and drudges of the mound-haunting race.’

‘These,’ the professor warns us, perhaps superfluously, ‘are conjectures which I cannot establish; but possibly somebody else may.’

I venture to hint a doubt. Not only is the derivation of _Coritani_ utterly uncertain,[1611] but it is safe to assume that the Celtic tribe who undoubtedly conquered the country which belonged in Ptolemy’s time to the Coritani would not have called its population, themselves included, by a name which described not even the people whom they found in possession, but the ‘slaves and drudges’ of that people, or rather of their neolithic predecessors! The professor indeed argued in _Celtic Folk-Lore_[1612] that the Coritanian dwarfs ‘may be conjectured to have had quiet from invaders from the Continent because of the inaccessible nature of their fens’. How then did they themselves and the non-dwarfish invaders of the Bronze Age get there? It is almost superfluous to remark that in the year before and in the year after the publication of _Celtic Folk-Lore_ the professor counted the Coritani among the Brythonic ‘invaders from the Continent’.[1613] The ‘mound-dwellings’ which Mr. MacRitchie describes[1614] belong to the class of structures which are popularly known as ‘Picts’ houses’, ‘Earth-houses’, or ‘Weems’, and are immeasurably later than the period to which Professor Rhys’s theory would compel him to assign them. The mere fact, indeed, that many of them have been shown by excavation to have been occupied in Roman times does not prove that they were not constructed earlier; but I can find no evidence that any of them belong even to the Neolithic Age. Mr. MacRitchie himself assures us that one which was opened at Crichton in Mid-Lothian ‘was proved to have been built not earlier than 80 A.D.’;[1615] and he assigns the ‘mound-dwellings’ in general not to a pre-neolithic race but to the Picts of historic times.[1616] He also says that one which was explored in 1855 contained four chambers, of which the largest was ‘6 feet 2 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches in height, and 2 feet 6 inches wide’, and, with a fascinating lack of humour, he adds that ‘while the size of the stones used in its construction is evidence of great personal strength on the part of the builders, the small and narrow rooms seem to indicate a diminutive race.’[1617] When the reader is invited to believe that ‘those who inhabited’ these ‘rooms’, which were only built by the exertion of ‘great personal strength’, ‘were of remarkably short stature’, he falls to calculating whether even a race of Tom Thumbs, each of whom possessed the muscular power of a Sandow, would not have used their strength to make their rooms a little more comfortable.[1618] Mr. MacRitchie shows more acumen when, after remarking that ‘two alleged Fairy Knowes in Shetland’ proved on investigation to be natural hillocks, and that another in Stirlingshire ‘was only a sepulchral mound’, he concludes that these instances are ‘sufficient to show the unreliable nature of popular tradition’.[1619] If it was ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’ that ‘enabled him to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs’, why should he not have exercised his faculty upon the comparatively short neolithic population rather than upon the imaginary pygmies whom Professor Rhys has appointed as their ‘slaves and drudges’?[1620] And if the imagination which created ‘a motley train of dwarfs’ had pygmies for its basis of fact, will the professor tell us who were the originals of the ‘motley train’ of giants whom the imaginations of various European peoples associated with the dwarfs?[1621] I am aware that Professor Kollmann[1622] claims to have proved that pygmies existed in prehistoric times in France, Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries; but the fact remains that no evidence has been produced that a race of pre-neolithic or even prehistoric pygmies existed in this country save only that which is furnished by ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’.

VI. NEOLITHIC MAN

The remains of neolithic man have been discovered in caves, in cairns, in submerged forests, and in barrows in Essex, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Caermarthenshire, Denbighshire, the Isle of Man,[1623] Argyllshire and the island of Arran, Caithness, and the Orkney Islands.[1624] The neolithic population, however, it need hardly be said, were scattered over many other parts of Britain in which their skeletons have not come to light. Many anthropologists consider that all of them belong to one race; but at all events the great majority represent men of medium stature with long skulls; and it is a generally accepted article of faith that no long barrow has ever yielded any article of metal in association with a primary interment, and that no skull whose cephalic index exceeded 79, belonging to a primary interment, has ever been found in a long barrow since the time when anthropologists first began to measure skulls in this country.[1625] According to a table[1626] published by Dr. Beddoe in 1894, the value of which has been confirmed by later measurements,[1627] the cephalic indices of 87 skulls belonging to the Neolithic Age ranged from 63 to 79; and, as Dr. Thurnam points out,[1628] some of them are more dolichocephalic than those of any modern European people.

When we come to examine the stature of the neolithic Britons, we find that, according to Thurnam’s latest estimate,[1629] the average height of 25 male skeletons found by him in long barrows was 5 feet 5·4 inches,[1630] or 1 metre 661: but Dr. Beddoe gives good reasons, to which I have already called attention,[1631] for believing this estimate to be too low; and his own is 5 feet 6.7 inches, or 1 metre 694.[1632] Recent measurements (although they include those of individuals under 5 feet) do not invalidate the evidence of these figures;[1633] and the few Scottish skeletons which undoubtedly belong to the Neolithic Age have yielded practically the same results.[1634]

Dr. Garson, describing the dolichocephalic Long Barrow skulls, with which anthropologists agree in associating those that have been found in the ‘horned cairns’ of Caithness,[1635] in the neolithic cairns of the isle of Arran,[1636] and in the caves of Oban,[1637] says that ‘the superciliary ridges and glabella [the surface between the superciliary ridges] are moderately or even feebly developed ... the malar [or cheek] bones are never prominent ... there is no tendency to prognathism ... as a whole the face is oval in form; the jaws are small and fine ... the facial characters are mild and without exaggerated development in any direction’.[1638] It may be added that the Long Barrow skulls, as Thurnam pointed out, are ‘more or less depressed--platycephalic’,[1639] and that the nose is usually aquiline.

The general truth of the foregoing descriptions will be apparent to any one who examines the plates in _Crania Britannica_; but we must take account of exceptions. As Dr. Davis pointed out,[1640] a skull found in the Long Lowe barrow, near Wetton in Staffordshire, is very different from another dolichocephalic skull from a chambered long barrow at Uley in Gloucestershire.[1641] In the latter the brow ridges are strongly marked, and the chin is comparatively broad and square.[1642] Of another skull, found in a barrow near Littleton Drew in North Wiltshire, Thurnam observes that the lower jaw is ‘thick and heavy’.[1643] A third, taken from a barrow at West Kennet in North Wiltshire, has an amazingly angular and square lower jaw, which, as Thurnam truly says, ‘deviates considerably from the normal type.’[1644]

Again, while the average stature of the Long Barrow skeletons which Thurnam examined was, according to the higher estimate of Dr. Beddoe, only 5 feet 6·7 inches,[1645] and Rolleston affirmed that he had ‘never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 6 inches ... in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the stone and bone period’,[1646] a skeleton found in the West Kennet barrow had a thigh bone 20 inches long;[1647] and its possessor would therefore have stood 6 feet high, or nearly 1 metre 830, on the lowest computation, and, according to the estimate of Dr. Beddoe, 6 feet 1½ inch or 1 metre 867. Not less remarkable is a dolichocephalic skeleton of almost identical dimensions,[1648] described by Dr. Garson, which, although it was found in a round barrow, undoubtedly belonged to the Neolithic Age.[1649]

It is evident, therefore, that although not one of the people, so far as we can tell, who buried their dead in long barrows was brachycephalic in index, yet not only was there a very wide range in their indices, but some of them were strikingly different, both in form of skull and feature and in stature, from the normal type. Were they the result of crossing between individuals of the Long Barrow race and tall brachycephalic invaders who will be noticed later? Thurnam himself pointed out that a male skull, whose cephalic index was 79, found in a primary interment in the long barrow of Charlton Abbot’s in Wiltshire, was ‘unquestionably brachycephalous’.[1650] The mere fact that its index was below the conventional limit did not blind him to its true character.

Let us now see how far those skulls of the Neolithic Age which have been found in other surroundings resemble the type which is associated with long barrows.

Putting aside the Scottish skulls which have been already mentioned, they comprise specimens found in the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire and Cefn, near St. Asaph; in a chambered cairn at Tyddyn Bleiddyn, near Cefn; in caves at Rhosdigre and Llandebie, and at Uphill in Somersetshire;[1651] in the East Ham Marshes, along with two ‘chipped celts’, fifteen feet below the surface;[1652] in the bed of the Trent at Muskham;[1653] and in a submarine forest, thirty feet below the level of the sea, near the Land’s End.[1654] Skulls found in tumuli at Keiss in Caithness,[1655] in a tumulus at Towyn-y-Capel in Anglesey,[1656] and in ‘what seems to be an alluvial deposit formed by the river Dove’, near Ledbury Hall in Derbyshire,[1657] may be added doubtfully to the list;[1658] but, as we shall afterwards see,[1659] there need be no doubt that certain brachycephalic skulls of the type which is commonly associated with the round barrows belonged to the Neolithic Age.

Professor Ripley[1660] holds that the Long Barrow people were ‘quite similar to’ those whose remains have been found in caves, if ‘somewhat less extreme in physical type’; and Huxley[1661] thought that all the dolichocephalic and mesaticephalic British skulls of the Neolithic Age belonged to the same race. Similarly Dr. Garson[1662] identifies the river-bed type, represented in Britain by the Muskham skull, with that of the long barrows; while, according to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the skulls from the Welsh caves and from Tyddyn Bleiddyn ‘agree in shape ... with some of those given in Tables i. and ii. of the “Crania Britannica” as “ancient British”’,[1663] and ‘belong to that type which Professor Huxley terms the river-bed skull’,[1664] and which, according to him, was identical ‘in general characters’ with the Long Barrow type.[1665] Dr. Beddoe,[1666] on the contrary, says that both they and the Caithness skulls ‘depart considerably from the typical long-barrow cranium’, and is inclined to regard them as belonging to a distinct mesaticephalic race.[1667] The cephalic indices of the Welsh skulls, which range from 74·3 to 80,[1668] are considerably higher than those of the Long Barrow skulls in general; and (though this may be unimportant) the average height of the men to whom they belonged was ‘little more than 5 feet’,[1669] or considerably below the average height of the Long Barrow people. In my opinion neither they nor the Land’s End skull, which resembles them,[1670] are pure specimens of the Long Barrow type;[1671] and the same may be said of the East Ham and Muskham skulls. The one from Towyn-y-Capel, on the other hand, might be supposed to have come from a long barrow. The cephalic indices of the Caithness skulls range from 73 to 78. Four of them[1672] might, I think, pass muster as Long Barrow skulls; but the remaining two[1673] appear to me different. Of the Ledbury skull, the cephalic index of which is 77, Huxley himself says that ‘a little flattening and elongation, with a rather greater development of the supraciliary ridges would convert this into the nearest likeness to the Neanderthal skull which has yet been discovered’.[1674] It may be that there was some infusion of the blood of the Long Barrow race in all the people to whom these skulls belonged; but I have little doubt that if, with the few exceptions which I have noted, they were placed on a table among those of the long barrows, a skilled craniologist could pick out every one of them. The difference is easily accounted for when it is remembered that the long barrows were almost certainly erected late in the Neolithic Age,[1675] and that there were neolithic men in Scotland when the estuary of the Forth extended 8 or 10 miles west of Stirling, and when the sea relatively to the west coast was 25 feet higher than it is now.[1676]

A female skull, belonging apparently to the Neolithic Age, was discovered about the year 1891 ‘on the Batten promontory, near Plymouth Sound’.[1677] According to the report of the discovery, it ‘approaches dolichocephaly’. A photograph of this skull[1678] reminded me of some of the illustrations of round skulls in _Crania Britannica_. To quote from the report,[1679] ‘the most striking features of the face are the great size of the orbits, the strongly marked superciliary ridge, the lowness of the retreating forehead’; and all these features are characteristic of some of the most typical Bronze Age skulls.

A few years ago Professor Macalister said that he had not recognized any skulls of the Long Barrow type in Ireland,[1680] where no such barrows exist; but several specimens have since been found.[1681]

There is, as we have seen, reason to believe that the neolithic population of Britain were not homogeneous; but, with the qualifications that have been already noted, it may be truly said that the people of the long barrows present a uniform type. Whence did they come, and what were their affinities? The view which may be said to hold the field, although it is not universally accepted,[1682] is that they belonged to the so-called ‘Iberian’ race. Before we discuss this theory, it may be well to warn the reader that among those who hold it are writers who have absolutely no knowledge of ‘the Iberian question’ except on the side of physical anthropology. The word ‘Iberian’, as used by ethnologists, is not always confined to the Iberians of history, that is, the inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula and of Southern Gaul between the Pyrenees and the Rhône:[1683] it is often loosely applied to a people, possessing certain common physical features, who inhabited various parts of the Mediterranean basin, and, according to some writers, notably Sergi,[1684] penetrated in late quaternary and neolithic times into almost every country of Europe. And when it is applied by ethnologists to the Iberians of history, it is not applied to all of them, for the Iberians of history were of course a mixed people: the ethnologists are thinking only of those Iberians who belonged to the dolichocephalic Mediterranean stock.

The arguments which have been brought forward in favour of the theory that the Long Barrow race belonged to the Iberian branch of the Mediterranean stock may be summarized as follows:--First, according to Tacitus,[1685] the Silures, a British tribe which in his time inhabited what is now Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire, and Herefordshire, were dark and had curly hair, from which fact, as well as from their geographical position, he inferred that Iberians, that is inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula, had migrated into Britain.[1686] But if the dolichocephalic Iberians were dark, so were the brachycephalic people who settled in Gaul in the Neolithic Age: Tacitus’s geographical argument was based upon the notion, prevalent among the ancient geographers,[1687] that Spain was ‘opposite’ and near Britain; and it is of course incredible that people should have sailed in the Neolithic Age from Spain to our island.

Secondly, much stress has been laid upon the alleged resemblance of the Long Barrow skulls to those of the Basques, the assumption being that the latter were Iberians, properly so called. Dr. Garson affirms that there is ‘a strong similarity between Basque skulls and those of the Neolithic people of Britain’;[1688] while Thurnam[1689] points out that the skulls of the Basques are very ‘similar in many respects to the skulls from chambered long barrows of South-West Britain’, and that the Long Barrow skulls in general closely resemble ‘sixty Basque skulls lately added to the collection of the Anthropological Society of Paris’.[1690] Moreover, Dr. Beddoe[1691] says, ‘Many photographs of Basques ... are recognized, both by myself and by an observant Welsh anthropologist to whom I have submitted them, as being in no respect different from some of the ordinary types of feature in South Wales.’

Now, as I have shown elsewhere,[1692] the investigations which have been made regarding the cranial characters of the Basques have led to widely different results; and Dr. Garson does not say to what group of Basque skulls he refers. Both the Spanish and the French Basques, according to Dr. Collignon,[1693] differ in certain respects from all other European peoples; but they also differ from each other, the former being generally dolichocephalic, while the latter are (according to Broca’s notation)[1694] sub-brachycephalic, and their cranial capacity is considerably less than that of their Spanish brethren. Dr. Collignon is inclined to assimilate the Basques generally to the Kabyle type.[1695] Assuming that the Long Barrow race resembled the Spanish Basques in certain respects, the resemblance only tends to show that the ancestors of the Long Barrow race came from the south. The ancestors, or rather some of the ancestors of the Basques were undoubtedly Iberians,--in one sense of the word: but the French Basque type which Dr. Collignon has described, and which he regards as original,[1696] is in many respects different from that of the long barrows, which ethnologists call Iberian; and, as I have shown elsewhere,[1697] the purest French Basques are generally fair, the Spanish Basques are less dark than other Spaniards, and the Long Barrow race were undoubtedly dark. Moreover, many ethnologists overlook the fact that the language of the so-called Iberian inscriptions, which have been found scattered over the territory that belonged to the Iberians, cannot be interpreted by the aid of Basque,[1698] and shows no trace of kinship with Basque.

Thirdly, Sergi, affirming that the Long Barrow people belonged to the Iberian branch of the stock which he has taught ethnologists to call Mediterranean, says,[1699] ‘I have compared the forms of the skulls from British graves with ancient.... Mediterranean skulls, and have found those characteristic of Spain, of Portugal ... of Greece, of Hissarlik, and of East Africa.’ The fact is undeniable; but obviously it does not tend to prove that the Long Barrow race belonged to the Iberian rather than to the Ligurian branch, which, according to Sergi,[1700] ‘extends from the Iberian peninsula as far as Italy,’ or to any other branch of the Mediterranean stock. Moreover, when Sergi affirms[1701] that ‘wherever the Mediterranean stock established itself, it preserved its primitive burial custom of inhumation’, and that ‘incineration was of absolutely Aryan [that is to say, on his theory, Asiatic] origin’,[1702] he weakens his argument, for it is certain that incineration was practised by many of the Long Barrow people.[1703] Furthermore, Sergi tells us that skeletons of ‘the Mediterranean type’ are characterized by ‘slender and delicate forms’,[1704] and doubtless most of the skeletons which have been found in long barrows answer to this description; but thirteen skeletons found in a chambered long barrow at Rodmarton, Gloucestershire, were distinguished by ‘powerful and vigorous frames’.[1705]

I conclude that there is not sufficient evidence for referring the Long Barrow people to the Iberian rather than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.

It is generally admitted that the Long Barrow race closely resembled in cranial characteristics, and to a lesser degree in stature, the dolichocephalic neolithic population of Gaul, of whom the people whose remains have been discovered in the caverns of l’Homme Mort[1706] and Baumes-Chaudes[1707] were perhaps the most typical representatives; and this resemblance confirms the truth of the theory that the Long Barrow people were a branch of the ‘Mediterranean’ stock. But one argument, upon which Thurnam[1708] laid great stress, should warn us to be cautious in drawing conclusions from the skeletal characters of prehistoric peoples of whose other characters we are necessarily ignorant. About the middle of the nineteenth century several skeletons were discovered in a neolithic barrow at Fontenay, near Caen. Their skulls resembled those of the long barrows; and the height of the tallest, according to Thurnam’s system of measurement, would not have exceeded 5 feet 1 inch, or 1 metre 550. This, he triumphantly remarks, confirms the opinion that the peoples who erected the sepulchral chambers at Fontenay and in the south-west of England belonged to the same race. But the average height of the Long Barrow people, according to Thurnam, was 5 feet 5·4 inches,[1709] and the average height of the brachycephalic Round Barrow people 5 feet 8·4 inches.[1710] This difference of 3 inches is one of the facts upon which he relies to prove the distinction--a distinction which is of course as certain as it is universally admitted--between the Long Barrow people and the brachycephalic Round Barrow people. Yet he regards the difference of 4·4 inches between the average height of the Long Barrow people and the tallest of the men who were buried at Fontenay as sufficient to prove the racial identity of the latter with the former!

Dr. Keane[1711] maintains that the route followed by the people who introduced the neolithic culture into the British Isles is indicated by the dolmens which abound in many parts of Northern Africa, and are scattered along the western side of the Spanish peninsula and over nearly the whole area of France. This is also the opinion of Professor Flinders Petrie, who affirms that ‘the dolmens belong to one continuous series, passing from Syria, along North Africa, and up Spain to Western Europe’,[1712] of Montelius,[1713] Sophus Müller,[1714] and Sergi.[1715] Penka, on the other hand (I quote from Mr. J. L. Myres’s exposition of his views), ‘reads the series the other way,’ because ‘while on the north these monuments go back into the Stone Age, in France and the south they belong to the Bronze Age’. He observes that ‘the discovery of dolmens in North Africa and Syria ... has proceeded _pari passu_ with the discovery both of actual survival of a tall blond dolichocephalic race in the same areas, and of evidence in Egyptian portraiture of its wider extension in the second millennium B.C.’ He maintains therefore that the earliest dolmen-builders were dolichocephalic blonds, speaking an Aryan language, in Southern Scandinavia and Denmark.[1716]

Now the ethnological problem presented by the distribution of the dolmens is exceedingly difficult; and it is not certain that either of the above-mentioned views is right. Dolmens are found not only in the countries which have been already mentioned, but also in Japan, India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Moab, Asia Minor, the Crimea, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, and the Balearic Islands;[1717] and it is possible that in certain other countries their non-existence may be due simply to lack of the necessary stones.[1718] In the territory which corresponds with ancient Gaul there are no dolmens east of the line formed by the Jura and the Vosges;[1719] while the departments in which they are most numerous form a band extending obliquely from Finistère to Gard, that is, from the Channel to the Mediterranean.[1720] The single department of the Morbihan contains more megalithic monuments, including menhirs, or single standing stones, than all the other departments put together; but in the list of dolmens it ranks below Aveyron and Ardèche.[1721] In the Spanish peninsula almost all the dolmens are concentrated in Portugal, the north-eastern corner of Spain, and the southern and eastern seaboard: in Southern Britain they are found in Cornwall, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and Northumberland, in Monmouthshire,[1722] Herefordshire, and Wales;[1723] while in Scotland they are represented by the horned cairns of Caithness and the chambered cairns of Orkney, Inverness, Argyllshire, Arran, and other islands.[1724] In Ireland they are everywhere, but most numerous in the west.[1725]

There is a striking resemblance, which, in certain cases, amounts to almost complete identity of form, between many of the dolmens of Western Europe and some even of the Caucasus and India; although, as might have been expected, local peculiarities exist everywhere.[1726] Thus the chambered long barrow of West Kennet in Wiltshire is identical in construction with the Hünebedden, or ‘Giants’ Graves’, of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and Hanover;[1727] and close resemblances have been noted between certain dolmens in Wales and others in Brittany and Portugal,[1728] between some in Antrim and others in Denmark,[1729] and between certain Irish dolmens and the peculiar ship-shaped monuments of the Balearic Isles.[1730] It is of course true that in sepulchres of such rude and simple construction general resemblance is inevitable, and does not necessarily imply community of origin: but when we find that in the Caucasus, in Syria and India, and in every European country in which dolmens exist some few have one of their stones pierced with a hole;[1731] that the covering-stones of certain dolmens in Portugal, Ireland, Cornwall, Sweden, and elsewhere are indented with small circular depressions,[1732] and that the sepulchral customs discernible in the dolmens of widely separated countries are virtually identical,[1733] it must be admitted that there is ground for the opinion that the custom of dolmen-building originated with some one people.[1734] On the other hand, it is easily conceivable that these coincidences originated in customs and beliefs which may have been common property before the first dolmen was set up, or which may have been handed on at a later time from tribe to tribe. De Mortillet argued that dolmens were not the exclusive creation of any one race because in France skeletons of widely different races have been found within them.[1735] But this fact only proves that an intruding race buried their dead in dolmens built by others, or else adopted the custom of dolmen-building from their predecessors. It has also been argued that the differences in detail which are noticeable in the dolmens of the various countries of Western Europe prove that they were not the work of one migratory people but of various settled tribes; and that this conclusion is borne out by the similarity between the culture of the dolmen-builders of widely separated countries such as France and Denmark.[1736] What is certain is that if the dolmens had been erected successively by peoples who migrated westward from Syria or even North Africa, and whose descendants moved on northward to the British Isles, we should expect to find that the British dolmens belonged to a period very much later than those of the Mediterranean. But the oldest dolmens of North Africa are assigned by General Faidherbe to the very end of the Neolithic and the commencement of the Bronze Age.[1737] The arguments of Penka, whatever value they may have in regard to the origin of dolmen-building, certainly do not prove that the Long Barrow race were descended from Scandinavian ancestors: for their skulls are easily distinguishable from those of Scandinavia;[1738] the neolithic pottery of Britain is utterly different from that of the north;[1739] and the distribution of the dolmens in the British Isles, where they are most numerous in Western Britain and in Ireland, is hardly consistent with the theory that the people who erected them came from the north-east. Moreover, the remains which have been found in the oldest Scandinavian dolmens indicate that the culture which they represent was more advanced than that which is manifested in similar tombs in Gaul or the British Isles.[1740]

On the question of the origin of dolmens I offer no opinion. But in regard to those of Western Europe the least improbable theory appears to be that which was first tentatively propounded by M. Cazalis de Fondonce,[1741] and developed by Mr. Borlase,[1742] namely, that a dolichocephalic people who were erecting dolmens in France and the Spanish peninsula, where these monuments may have been evolved from sepulchral caves,[1743] were forced westward by the brachycephalic ‘Grenelle’ race who invaded those countries in the Neolithic Age;[1744] that some of them migrated into the British Isles, and others into Holland and Northern Germany,[1745] whence the custom of dolmen-building would have spread to Denmark and Scandinavia; and that others [perhaps] moved southward into Africa. The earlier neolithic dolmen-builders of Gaul, like the Long Barrow people of Britain, belonged to the ‘Mediterranean’ type; and on the theory which I have stated their ancestors might have migrated into Spain and Gaul from Africa long before the first African dolmen was erected.

Lastly, linguistic arguments have been adduced to prove the African origin of the Long Barrow race.[1746] Professor Morris Jones[1747] endeavours to show that the Celtic language was modified, after it had been introduced into Britain, by the language or languages which it encountered;[1748] and he claims to have established the syntactical similarity of the modern Celtic dialects to Egyptian and to the Hamitic dialects generally, and to have demonstrated that ‘neo-Celtic syntax agrees with Hamitic in almost every point where it differs from Aryan’.[1749] This, he concludes, is ‘the linguistic complement of the anthropological evidence, and the strongest corroboration of the theory of the kinship of the early inhabitants of Britain to the North African white race’.

I would not, however, venture to commit myself to the theory of Sergi, that the cradle of the ‘Iberian’ race, or of the ‘Mediterranean’ race of which it was an offshoot, was in Northern Africa or Somaliland.[1750] Professor Boyd Dawkins infers ‘from their range as far north as Scotland, and at least as far to the east as Belgium, that they travelled by the same paths that the Celtic, Belgic, and Germanic tribes travelled ... coming from the East, and pushing their way to the West; and that another [group] mastered Northern Africa’; and he argues that this view ‘is confirmed by the examination of the domestic animals which they possessed. The short-horned ox, the sheep, and the goat, are derived from wild stocks that are now to be found only in Central Asia.... None of these animals were known in Europe before the Neolithic Age.’[1751] But any one who has read so far will have seen that the range of the ‘Iberian’ race ‘as far north as Scotland’ lends no support to the theory that it originated in Asia. In regard to the argument which the professor derives from the examination of the domestic animals, Rolleston[1752] inclined to the view that ‘though coming in the ultimate resort from the east, [they] ... did not reach the north of the Alps directly from the East, but only ... from the Greek and Italian peninsulas’. But the truth is that we do not know whether the _earliest_ neolithic invaders of the British Isles or of Western Europe possessed short-horned oxen, sheep, or goats.[1753] Supposing that these animals came from the East, is it not possible that they were introduced into Europe not by the ‘Mediterranean’ race but by brachycephalic neolithic immigrants? Moreover, Professor Boyd Dawkins has himself admitted that ‘the common domestic hog, descended from the wild boar, may have been originally tamed in Europe’,[1754] and that the vegetables possessed by the Swiss lake-dwellers may have been ‘derived from Southern Europe’;[1755] and it is now generally held that the domestic animals of the neolithic inhabitants of Europe were of European origin, and that there is no evidence that their plants and cereals were derived from Asia.[1756]

On the whole the evidence shows that the neolithic inhabitants of Britain, or at all events a large proportion of them, were descended from ancestors who lived in the Mediterranean basin. But it does not follow that they were more intimately related to the people whom the ancient writers called Iberians than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock. It is certain that before the Romans entered the Spanish peninsula two languages at least besides Celtic were spoken there,--Basque and the language of the so-called Iberian inscriptions.[1757] The latter has not yet been deciphered: but, as we have seen,[1758] all attempts to explain it by means of Basque have failed; and, as Professor Morris Jones admits, all attempts to discover traces of Basque influence in the Celtic dialects have been equally unsuccessful.[1759]

Therefore it should be distinctly understood that if the term ‘Iberian’ is to be applied to the neolithic inhabitants of Britain, it must be taken in a purely conventional sense.[1760]

M. d’Arbois de Jubainville[1761] adduces various British place-names, for example, _Sabrina_ (the Severn), Isca (the Exe), _Albion_, and _Cantium_ (Kent), which he chooses to call Ligurian; but I am not aware that he has made any converts. Little or nothing is known about the Ligurian tongue;[1762] and even if M. d’Arbois’s conjectures could be verified their ethnological value would be comparatively slight; for, as I have shown elsewhere,[1763] there is some reason to believe that the Ligurians, like the Iberians, belonged to the ‘Mediterranean’ stock.

It is perhaps hardly necessary now to insist upon the fact that the Long Barrow race is not extinct. Not only have their remains been found, as we shall presently see, in graves of the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic period,[1764] but men of the same type, but little modified, are still numerous.[1765]

It is often taken for granted that no round barrows were erected in Britain before the close of the Neolithic Age, and that the earliest of the brachycephalic invaders whose remains have been found in them landed with bronze weapons in their hands.[1766] But these assumptions are made in spite of conclusive evidence. There is not the slightest doubt that most if not all of the circular chambered cairns of Argyllshire, Caithness, Orkney, and Derbyshire were erected before the Bronze Age in those parts began.[1767] Dr. Garson, speaking of brachycephalic skulls which have been found in round barrows in Orkney, says that ‘the fact that no metals of any kind were found, and that all the implements were of the most primitive manufacture, points to the people belonging to the unpolished stone period’, and concludes that ‘we probably post-date the existence of the people who buried in the round barrows of Orkney if we attribute them with (_sic_) the same antiquity as those of the round barrows of England’.[1768] Dr. Garson has also shown that the round barrow of Howe Hill in Yorkshire was erected in the Neolithic Age, and that the skeletons found in it belong to the Long Barrow type.[1769] The round-headed people who introduced drinking-cups into our island brought no bronze with them. According to Barnard Davis, a skull from a chambered round barrow at Parsley Hay Low in Derbyshire, which had a cephalic index of 81, ‘without doubt belongs to the early “stone-period”’;[1770] and he assigns to the same epoch another skull, the cephalic index of which was the same, from Green Gate Hill barrow, Pickering, Yorkshire.[1771] Canon Greenwell suggests that some of the round barrows ‘belong to an age before bronze was discovered’; and it is certain that the round barrows of this country were connected by evolution with the earlier long barrows.[1772] Finally, if Sergi[1773] is right in maintaining that ‘the new burial custom of cremation’ was introduced into Europe by brachycephalic immigrants, it follows that they invaded Britain in the Neolithic Age; for in this country, as in Gaul, cremation was then practised.[1774]

VII. THE ‘PICTISH QUESTION’

A view which has become fashionable of late years, owing to the influence of Professor Rhys and Professor Zimmer, is that the [dolichocephalic] neolithic people of this country were identical with the Picts,[1775] whose name first occurs in the panegyric addressed about A.D. 296 to Constantius Caesar.[1776] To clear the ground, I should say, first, that it is universally admitted that descendants of the neolithic race survived not only in the part of Scotland which was inhabited by the Picts but in most parts of Britain. The question is whether the Picts represented that race in a special sense, and still spoke the neolithic non-Aryan language. As we shall see, Professor Rhys himself, who maintains that they did, emphatically affirms that among the medley of tribes who were known as Picts some were Celtic and spoke a Celtic tongue. Secondly, it may be well to state certain elementary facts of Celtic phonology (although I dare say that to most of those who may read these pages they are already familiar), without a knowledge of which parts of the following discussion and of the later section on the Celts would be unintelligible. The ancient Gauls, for the most part,[1777] and the Brythons, from whose dialect modern Welsh is descended, are commonly called the P Celts; while the Goidels, whose dialect was the ancestor of Gaelic, Irish, and Manx, are known as the Q Celts. The reason of this distinction is that the Gauls and Brythons changed the original sound _qu_ into _p_, while the Goidels retained it, and in the sixth century of our era modified it into _c_.[1778] It has been affirmed, however, on the evidence of the formularies of Marcellus of Bordeaux, that some of the Western Gauls in the fourth century spoke a dialect which was akin to Goidelic;[1779] and Professor Rhys and Mr. Nicholson[1780] regard the words _Sequani_ and _Sequana_ (the Gallic name of the Seine) as proving that this dialect was not confined to the west: but M. d’Arbois de Jubainville refuses to admit that these names are Celtic,[1781] and contemptuously denies that the formularies are to be taken seriously.[1782] Professor Rhys[1783] and Mr. Nicholson[1784] also infer from certain inscriptions found in the departments of the Ain and Deux-Sèvres, which probably belong respectively to the first and the fourth century of our era, that a dialect akin to Goidelic was spoken in those localities: but here again M. d’Arbois dissents;[1785] and he remarks that an inscription found at Géligneux in the department of the Ain contains a word, _petru-decametos_,[1786] which belongs to the language of the P Celts. Professor Rhys urges that ‘the presence of monuments in the language occupying the subordinate position may be taken as evidence presumptive of its being the vernacular in the immediate neighbourhood’:[1787] but, as we shall see hereafter,[1788] a pillar, bearing a Goidelic inscription, has been found at Silchester, where the vernacular was undoubtedly Brythonic; and the obvious explanation is that the inscription was the work of a stranger. M. d’Arbois,[1789] moreover, unlike Professor Rhys, maintains that when the Celts first invaded Britain, the Celtic language everywhere was one and the same: according to him, none of the Celts had then changed _q_ into _p_, but that change was made at a later date by the Celts who conquered Gaul, and some of whose descendants afterwards conquered Britain. Until near the end of the nineteenth century Celtic scholars unanimously believed that all the Celtic dialects had rejected ‘Indo-European _p_’, except, as Mr. Nicholson says,[1790] ‘in borrowed words or in certain combinations of consonants’; in other words, that wherever the Indo-European or Aryan tongue from which Celtic was descended had the sound of _p_ the Celtic dialects had all lost it: but Professor Rhys holds that Mr. Nicholson has proved from the above-mentioned inscriptions, found in the departments of the Ain and Deux Sèvres, that it was retained by the Sequani and the Pictones.[1791] M. d’Arbois de Jubainville of course rejects this conclusion; and he reminds his opponents that _p_ is absent from all Ogam inscriptions.[1792]