Thus with Penka I have argued for an Aryan race, which was Nordic in type, with Cuno that the primitive Wiro language developed on an open plain, which, with Latham and Schrader, I have placed on the Russian steppe. I have found myself in agreement with Sir John Rhys on the main features of his thesis that the Q and P Wiros left Central Europe in two successive waves, and I have argued that the Q Wiros were armed with bronze leaf-shaped swords. This last suggestion has already been hazarded in this country by Crawford,[479] though backed up with inadequate evidence, and in France by M. Hubert,[480] with whose evidence I am unacquainted, as his work dealing with the subject has not appeared as I write.
But in all these cases I have endeavoured to support my argument, not merely with philological data, as has been the case with most of my predecessors, but with evidence drawn from anthropology and archæology. The evidence from the Italian swords, backed up as it is by the absence of Hallstatt iron swords from the Seine valley, seems so decisive that I feel that the equation of the Q peoples with the spread of the bronze swords is beyond dispute.
But if this general reconstruction of the early history of the Wiro movements is to be considered correct, in outline at least, it must be shown that it will fit in with all the linguistic evidence available; at any rate that it is not incompatible with it. For that reason I propose in this chapter to summarise briefly, as I conceive them, the wanderings of the Wiros over Europe and Asia, from their first departure from south-east Europe.
We have found reason for believing that before 3000 B.C., and probably for long before that date, the Wiros had been occupying the Russian steppes east of the Dnieper, and had perhaps wandered across the Volga into Turkestan. They were a nomad people, living, perhaps, partly by hunting, but mainly by herding cattle on the grassy steppes, and the parklands which fringed them on the north. They had tamed the horse, and held this animal in great veneration. Its name constantly occurs as part of their own names,[481] they rode it like cow-boys “punching” their cattle, and if we may judge from the habits of their descendants, it was what may be described as a cult animal.
We have seen that they seem to have been of the Nordic type, but this statement needs qualification. We are accustomed to speak of Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans, and to describe their physical characters in considerable detail. We are well aware that the population of every country in Europe is mixed, and contains many examples of at least two of these types and a larger number of individuals who resemble one type in this feature and another in that; there are also many who display intermediate characters. But from this mass of heterogeneous material we believe that we have isolated these types, which we consider pure, and we treat the bulk of the population as a mixture of these, varying in its components and their proportions in each region. This postulates that there was a time, the race-making period of some writers,[482] when each of these races was living, pure and unmixed, in some area of isolation.
That this position has led to clear thinking and has advanced the science of physical anthropology is undoubted, but we have to consider whether it represents a condition which has actually occurred. That such a pure and homogeneous type would evolve if a community were isolated from all others for a sufficient length of time is probable, but we have no clear evidence that such a state of isolation has been preserved for a sufficient period in any part of Europe, or for that matter in the world. The Andamanese have for long kept themselves in fairly complete isolation in a small group of islands, yet their type seems to show evidence of admixture. The same is more true of the Australian aborigines, although the island continent has almost succeeded in keeping out other placental animals. It is true that as we go back into the past, especially into early neolithic times, the skulls in any given region appear more homogeneous than is the case at later periods. After the forests had appeared in Magdalenian times, and until the metal trade arose, communities seem to have been more isolated than either before or after. This was, apparently, the race-making period postulated by McDougall. But the communities who settled at that time in these regions of isolation were to some extent of mixed ancestry, and their isolation was not of sufficient length to insure absolute homogeneity, though we find a closer approximation to it then than has occurred since.
We have seen at the close of Chapter II. that what we have been accustomed to consider the Mediterranean race is in reality a mixture of several late palæolithic types, all somewhat resembling one another in their most conspicuous features, and the same seems to have been true of the Nordic Wiros, during their race-making period on the Russian steppe. Unfortunately we have no very long series of skulls to study, and in the case of some we are uncertain whether they belong to this or to a slightly later date. But Sergi has described a series of ninety-one,[483] which will give us some idea of their range of variation. Thirty-six of these skulls have indices varying from seventy-three to seventy-six, thirty-one more between seventy-one and seventy-eight, while the remaining twenty-four range outside these from sixty-five to eighty-one. Many of these skulls are very high, and so conform to the type of Brünn-Brux-Combe Capelle, and this has led Fleure to suspect that this late palæolithic type, the essentially intrusive element into the west of Solutrean times, is present in considerable numbers among these steppe-folk.[484] According to Sergi fifty-one out of the ninety-one show this feature and these are distributed pretty generally among all indices from sixty-five to seventy-nine.
Again, Bogdanov has given us reason for believing that two races were inhabiting the government of Moscow during the kurgan period. “One of these races was robust, with a large and long head, an elongated face, and, according to some examples, with hair more or less fair. The other, smaller and more poverty stricken, belongs to a brachycephalic people, having a shorter face, a wider and shorter head, and chestnut hair.”[485] He shows, too, that in the centre of the area the long-headed type was purest, and cites twenty-three skulls from the kurgans of Souja, in the government of Kursk, of which nineteen were true dolichocephals, while three women and one child were subdolichocephalic.
We may, I think, consider the two skulls described by Sergi with an index of eighty, and the one with an index of eighty-one, as belonging to a foreign element living on the border of the steppes, perhaps as belonging to the Tripolje folk. If so we may consider our primitive Nordics as having fairly long and narrow heads, though in this respect not so uniformly narrow as was the case with the Mediterraneans of the west. The cephalic index seems to have ranged from sixty-five to seventy-nine, though more usually from seventy-one to seventy-eight, while the more typical members of the group varied from seventy-three to seventy-six. These figures will be found to agree fairly well with observations made on the tall fair people of the present population of North Europe.
We can then imagine our Wiros as a somewhat variable race, with heads which conform to the narrow rather than to the broad type, tall and robust, though probably neither so tall nor so robust as many of the modern Nordics. There is reason for believing them to have been fair, with transparent skins, light hair and grey eyes, though it is likely enough that in colouration, too, there was considerable variation. We may well believe that the extremely fair colouring of the modern Swedes is a later specialisation, due to a few thousand years of life in a northern home, but we shall do well, I would suggest, to think of the original Wiros as blonds rather than brunets, though not necessarily or in all cases possessing an extreme degree of blondness. Such then I would have you picture the Wiros on the steppe, and I would also remind you that many of them seem to have been descendants of the late Aurignacian and Solutrean horse-hunters, and that they may have developed the rudiments of their language in some post-Solutrean time within the Carpathian ring.