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

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

There are precedents for all these singular features of the Ofnet interment in other Upper Palæolithic burials, namely, the embedding in ochre, the offerings of ornaments of teeth and of shells, the separate interment of the skull—all these were customs more or less characteristic of the Upper Palæolithic, but never observed in Neolithic times.

Fig. 255. Skulls of the two races of Ofnet. Three views of a broad-headed or brachycephalic skull (above) from the great burial at Ofnet. Three views of a narrow-headed or dolichocephalic skull (below) from the same grotto. After R. R. Schmidt. One-quarter life size.

It will be recalled that the custom of burying the entire body, as well as that of embedding the body in ochre, is first observed among the late Neanderthals and obtained throughout the entire Upper Palæolithic from the Aurignacian burials of Grimaldi to the Azilian, of Mas d'Azil. No other case, however, is known of the westward turning of the face: in most of the Upper Palæolithic burials the face of the departed looks toward the opening of the grotto; but, although the grotto of Ofnet opens toward the southwest, the skulls, without exception, were facing exactly to the west and looking toward the wall rather than toward the entrance of the cavern.

The New Broad-Headed and Narrow-Headed Races of Ofnet

The burials at Ofnet are the first observed in western Europe which present a mingling of races. This in itself is a fact of great interest; it is a prelude to what characterizes all the populations of western Europe at the present time, namely, the presence of races widely separated in origin and in anatomical structure, but closely united by similar customs, industries, and beliefs.

A second fact of even greater importance is the proof of the arrival in western Europe toward the close of Palæolithic times of two entirely new human stocks; one broad-headed, resembling the modern Alpine or Celtic type; the other narrow-headed, resembling the modern 'Mediterranean' type of Sergi. Beside these pure types there are several blended forms which are intermediate or mesaticephalic.

Of the eight brachycephalic heads, six are those of children; the two adult brachycephalic crania belong to young women and are, therefore, not quite so characteristic as male skulls would be, for in general racial type is more strongly marked in men than in women; the remaining skulls are either of a blended form or purely dolichocephalic.

The relationship of the broad-headed race to other prehistoric and existing broad-headed races of western Europe is also a matter of very great interest. The Ofnet brachycephals are regarded by Schliz[(13)] as closely similar to the type skull of the so-called Grenelle race, which, in turn, is closely similar to the Furfooz type. Thus the cephalic index of one (Fig. 255) of these broad, flattened skulls of Ofnet is 83.33 per cent; the face is relatively narrow, the zygomatic index being low—76.34 per cent; the brain capacity of the female skulls does not exceed 1,320 c.cm. The skull is further described as small, smooth, and delicately modelled, with a correspondingly feeble dentition, the teeth being small; the processes of muscular attachment are slightly developed, all of which characters indicate that the skull belonged to a woman about twenty-five years of age. The forehead is low, broad, and prominent. It is altogether typically parallel to the 'skull of Grenelle,' as well as to the female 'skull of Auvernier' described by Kollmann. The peculiarity of this broad-headed race, like that of Grenelle and of Furfooz, is that, while the forehead is of only moderate breadth, the posterior part of the skull is extremely broad. The broad-headed people of Ofnet are thus definitely considered by Schliz[(14)] as members of the Furfooz-Grenelle race.

The narrow-headed race of the Ofnet burials is distinct in every respect and presents resemblances to the branch of the 'Mediterranean' race found in the foreground of the Alpine regions to-day, in which the head is of a pear-shaped type. The best preserved of these dolichocephalic skulls (Fig. 255) presents an index of 70.50 per cent, with a brain capacity in the male of 1,500 c.cm., while the smallest brain capacity is that found in one of the female skulls with 1,100 c.cm. Among the five adult purely dolichocephalic skulls the face is not in the least of the broad or disharmonic Crô-Magnon type, but is in proportion with the cranium, and is thus truly harmonic. The resemblance of this narrow-headed Ofnet skull to that of the Brünn race, which we have described as occurring in Moravia in Solutrean times, is only partial, and Schliz concludes that among the narrow-headed people of Ofnet we have a form of dolichocephaly which is not identical with any of the known early dolichocephalic forms of western Europe, but which pursues an independent line of development similar to the narrow-headed races in the borders of the Alpine region of the present day. Thus this head type, of a uniform elliptic contour, seems to have become a stable racial element of the Alpine population, since we meet it again in later prehistoric times in the region of the southern and western foreground of the Alps. Among the children's skulls, two are of the narrow-headed, pear-shaped type similar to the Alpine dolichocephals of to-day, that is, with a narrow forehead and very broad posterior portions of the skull.