We must now turn to the valley of the Danube. Here we find a population characterized by similar ground form of skull, although according to Schliz[153] showing two fairly distinct varieties, a longer and a shorter cranium. Probably this population arrived in several successive waves. Its culture is evidently homogeneous. They are agriculturists forming fixed and permanent settlements, practising farming of a high grade. The characteristic implement is the mattock. Daggers and lance-heads are rare, or fail. They were a peaceful folk settling by preference, though not exclusively, in the loess districts, as at Grosgartach. We find, as we had every reason to expect, that northern Germany and Scandinavia were peopled by a pioneer folk not yet completely agricultural. The Danube people represent the farmers of the steppe whose migration probably went on more slowly and gradually, and who always remained more homogeneous physically and culturally. They may, or may not, have reached the Danube valley as early as the Germans and Scandinavians arrived at the Baltic, for they had far less distance to march. They spread out westward and northward. Here we trace them by their pottery. Starting from Hungary and the surrounding regions we find them in Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia, across south and middle Germany as far as the Rhine. We have already noticed that the banded pottery covered all this region, while the home of the corded pottery was North Germany.
But, while the form of the banded pottery is quite constant, the ornament varies greatly. We find the plain, often rude, saw-tooth pattern, the meander and scroll, the spiral-painted pottery—sometimes in the southeast plant patterns, perhaps introduced. I regret that I cannot find any clear or definite theory as to the exact relations of any of this pottery to that of Anau or Susa. The greatest variety, as well as the most complex patterns, seem to occur in most southeasterly regions, which, at least in later Neolithic times, were much under the influence of the Ægean culture, just as western Europe borrowed from Italy and Spain.
Here there was evidently a great and very complex mixture of cultures, and probably of peoples all of one great primitive stock, shown least modified in the Mediterranean race, here more influenced, changed, and varied by steppe climate and conditions, and more or less admixture.
Along the Swiss lakes we find the lake-dwellers. The few human remains from the earliest lake-dwellings are all brachycephalic—short-heads. Then in the period when copper was beginning to come in we find long-heads arriving in greater numbers, but the short-heads regain their superiority during the Bronze period. The weight of evidence seems to favor the view that these settlers did not come from the zone of “proto-brachycephals” inhabiting eastern France, but represent a new immigration from the east, and, according to Schliz, founded fortified settlements on the heights of Baden, Wurtemberg, and along the valley of the Rhine as far as Cologne.[154] We have seen that the pottery of these earliest immigrants was crude and almost or quite without definite ornament.
Northern and central Europe seem to have been settled mainly or almost entirely directly from the east, along western Russia and the Danube valley. But, especially toward the close of the period, people from the megalithic zone seem to have penetrated much farther southward into Germany than their monuments would prove. Schliz thinks that he has recognized their skulls as well as calyciform pottery over a wide region. Their presence seems fairly clear, but whether they were comparatively very few in number, or fairly numerous, is still uncertain.
There seems to be good reason for believing that in late Paleolithic time the population of middle Europe north of the Alps was very sparse and the Baltic region hardly inhabited. A hunting population without domestic animals except the dog pressed northward through Russia in waves and fragments, and along the Baltic mingled with a strain coming from the west, probably broad-heads from Belgium. The great Scandinavian and North German peoples followed with a frontier culture, a combination of hunting, fishing, cattle-raising, and agriculture mingled in proportions varying according to time and place. Their exact route of migration from the region of the steppes must yet be traced. But the weight of evidence favors an eastern origin. At a time probably not so very far from their arrival in the north, agriculturists—we might safely speak of them as farmers—were coming into the Danube valley and spreading along its tributaries. Apparently somewhat or considerably later the lake-dwellers appear along the northern piedmont zone of the Alps as broad-heads, marking the arrival of the advance guard of the great Alpine race of to-day. But here again our certainty is not as firm as we could wish. They extend northward toward and along the Rhine valley. The close of the period is marked by the southward spread of peoples from northern Germany crowding back the farmers characterized by the banded pottery. This movement is augmented somewhat, perhaps very little, by recruits from the megalithic zone of northwestern Europe and Denmark. All these people are closing in on central or middle western Europe. In the Rhine valley along the middle of the course of the river we find a region of mingling or overlapping cultures which have not yet been satisfactorily disentangled.
We have spoken of them as pioneers. It was a time and place of pioneer, frontier life. And frontier men and life have their peculiar physical, cultural, mental, and temperamental characteristics, almost apart from time and place. The people have something, at least, in common with the great American westward migrations and frontiersmen of a far later date. We have the successive waves of hunters, herdsmen, and farmers often overlapping or mingling. We have a grand mixing of peoples and cultures, if not of races. Many a fine art or technique is left behind. Life is rude, hard, vigorous, vital, joyous. It was so yesterday, it was probably so millennia ago. For the stratum of frontiersman and barbarian—not to say savage—lies just below the surface in us all, and a scratch exposes it. This was a period of vitality, hope, and promise.