History, Ancient; Human beings -- Origin; Prehistoric peoples
But to return to undoubted neolithic skulls, we have very clear
evidence that the four distinct European races already existed. Thus
in Britain we have two distinct forms of barrows or burial tombs, one
long, the other round, and it has become proverbial that long skulls
go with long barrows, and round skulls with round barrows. The long
barrows are the oldest, and belong entirely to the stone age, no
trace of metal, according to Canon Greenwell, having ever been found
in them. The skulls and skeletons are those of a long-headed, short,
and feeble race, who may be identified with the Iberians; while
the round barrows contain bronze and finally iron, and the people
buried in them were the tall, fair, round-headed Gauls or Celts of
early history, or intermediate types between these and the older
race. Later came in the tall, fair, and long-headed Anglo-Saxon and
Scandinavian races, so that we have three out of the four European
types clearly defined in the British islands and traceable in their
descendants of the present day. But when we attempt to go beyond
the Iberians of the neolithic age in Britain, we are completely
at fault. We have abundant remains of palæolithic implements, but
scarcely a single undoubted specimen of a palæolithic skeleton, and
it is impossible to say whether the men who feasted on the mammoth
and rhinoceros in Kent's cavern, or who left their rude implements
in the high-level gravel of the chalk downs, were tall or short,
long-headed or round-headed. On the contrary, there seems a great
hiatus between the neolithic and the palæolithic periods, and, as
Geikie has shown, this appears to be the case not in England only but
in a great part of Europe. It would almost seem as if the old era had
disappeared with the last glacial period, and a completely new one
had been introduced. But although the skulls and bones of palæolithic
races are wanting in Britain and scarce everywhere, enough of them
have been found in other European countries to enable anthropologists
not merely to say that different races already existed at this
immensely remote period, but to classify them by their types, and
see how far these correspond with those of later times. This has
been done especially in France and Belgium, where the discoveries of
palæolithic skeletons and skulls have been far more frequent than
elsewhere. Debierre in his _L'Homme avant l'histoire_, published in
the _Bibliothèque Scientifique_ of 1888, enumerates upwards of forty
instances of such undoubted Quaternary human remains, of which at
least twenty consisted of entire skulls, and others of jaws and other
important bones connected with racial type.
The best and latest conclusions of modern anthropology from these
remains will be found in this work of Debierre's, and in Hamy's
_Palæontologie humaine_, Quatrefages' _Races humaines_, and
Topinard's _Anthropologie_, and it will be sufficient to give a short
summary of the results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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