Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Crô-magnon Descendants in Modern Europe

We might attribute this great change, which affected all of western Europe, to the extinction of the Crô-Magnon race were it not for the existing evidence that the race survived throughout the Azilian-Tardenoisian or close of the Upper Palæolithic. On the close of the Palæolithic the race broke up throughout western Europe into many colonies, which can perhaps be traced into Neolithic and even into recent times. The anatomical evidence for this survival theory chiefly consists of the highly characteristic form of the head.

In Europe a very broad face and a long, narrow cranium is such an infrequent combination that anthropologists maintain that it affords a means of identifying the descendants of the prehistoric Crô-Magnon race wherever they persist to-day. Since Dordogne was the geographic centre of the race in Upper Palæolithic times, is it merely a coincidence that Dordogne is still the centre of a similar type? Ripley[(36)] has given us a valuable résumé of our present knowledge of this subject. The most significant trait of the long-headed people of Dordogne is that in many cases the face is almost as broad as in the normal Alpine round-headed type; in other words, it is strongly disharmonic; in profile the back part of the head rises and in front view the head is narrowed at the top; the skull is very low-vaulted; the brow ridges are prominent; the nose is well formed; the cheek-bones are prominent, and the powerful cheek muscles give a peculiarly rugged cast to the countenance. The appearance, however, is not repellent, but more often open and kindly. The men are of medium height, but very susceptible to environment as regards stature; they are tall in fertile places, and stunted in less prosperous districts. They are not degenerate at all, but keen and alert of mind. The present people of Dordogne agree with but one other type of men known to anthropologists, namely, the ancient Crô-Magnon race. The geographical evidence that here in Dordogne we have to do with the survivors of the real Crô-Magnon race seems to be sustained by a comparison of the characteristics of the prehistoric skulls found at Crô-Magnon, Laugerie Basse, and elsewhere in Dordogne, with the heads of the types of to-day. The cranial indices of the prehistoric skulls, varying from 70 per cent to 73 per cent, correspond with indices of the living head of 72 per cent to 75 per cent. None of the people of Dordogne are quite so long-headed as this, the average index of the living head in an extreme district being 76 per cent; but within the whole population there are much lower indices.

The probability of direct descent becomes stronger when we consider the disharmonic low-skulled shape of the Crô-Magnon head and the remarkable elongation of the skull at the back. In the prehistoric Crô-Magnons the brows were strongly developed, the eye orbits low, the chin prominent. The facial type has been characterized by de Quatrefages[(37)] as follows: "The eye depressed beneath the orbital vault; the nose straight rather than arched; the lips somewhat thick, the jaw and the cheek-bones strongly developed, the complexion very brown, the hair very dark and growing low on the forehead—a whole which, without being attractive, was in no way repulsive."

In southern France we observe a continuity not only of the head form but of the prevalence of black hair and eyes. Why should this Crô-Magnon type have survived at this point and have disappeared elsewhere? In order to consider the particular cause of this persistence of a Palæolithic race, we must, with Ripley, broaden our horizon, and consider the whole southwest from the Mediterranean to Brittany as a unit.

The survival is partly attributed to favorable geographical environment and partly to geological and racial barriers. On the north the intrusion of the Teutonic race was shut off and competition was narrowed down to the Crô-Magnon and Alpine types.

If the people of Dordogne are veritable survivors of the Crô-Magnons of the Upper Palæolithic, they certainly represent the oldest living race in western Europe, and is it not extremely significant that the most primitive language in Europe, that of the Basques of the northern Pyrenees, is spoken near by, only 200 miles to the southwest? Is there possibly a connection between the original language of the Crô-Magnons, a race which once crowded the region of the Cantabrian Mountains and the Pyrenees, and the existing agglutinative language of the Basques, which is totally different from all the European tongues? This hypothesis, suggested by Ripley,[(38)] is very well worth considering, for it is not inconceivable that the ancestors of the Basques conquered the Crô-Magnons and subsequently acquired their language.

The prehistoric Crô-Magnon men would seem, therefore, to have remained in or near their early settlements through all the changes of time and the vicissitudes of history. "It is, perhaps," observes Ripley, "the most striking instance known of a persistency of population unchanged through thousands of years."

The geographic extension of this race was once very much wider than it is to-day. The classical skull of Engis, Belgium, belongs to this type. It has been traced from Alsace in the east to the Atlantic in the west. Ranke asserts that it is to be found to-day in the hills of Thuringia, and that it was a prevalent type there in the past. Verneau considers that it was the type prevailing among the extinct Guanches of the Canary Islands. Collignon[(39)] has identified it in northern Africa, and regards the Crô-Magnons as a subvariety of the Mediterranean race, an opinion consistent at least with the archæological evidence that this race came into Europe with the Aurignacian culture, which was circum-Mediterranean in distribution. Traces of Crô-Magnon head formation are found among the living Berbers.

At present, however, this race is believed to survive only in a few isolated localities, namely, in Dordogne, at a small spot in Landes, near the Garonne in southern France, and at Lannion in Brittany, where nearly one-third of the population is of the Crô-Magnon type. It is said to survive on the island of Oléron off the west coast of France, and there is evidence of similar descent to be found among the people of the islands of northern Holland. The people of Trysil, on the Scandinavian peninsula, are characterized as having disharmonic features, possibly representing an outcrop of the Crô-Magnon type.