The introduction of bronze into England and into Scandinavia may be safely dated about one thousand years later, after 1800 B. C. The fact that the Alpines only barely reached Ireland indicates that at this time that island was severed from England and that the land connection between England and France had been broken. The computation of the foregoing dates, of course, is somewhat hypothetical, but the fixed fact remains that this last expansion of the Alpines brought the knowledge of bronze to western and northern Europe and to the Mediterranean and Nordic peoples living there.
The effect of the introduction of bronze in the areas occupied chiefly by the Mediterranean race along the Atlantic coast and in Britain, as well as in north Africa from Tunis to Morocco, is seen in the construction and in the wide distribution of the megalithic funeral monuments, which appear to have been erected, not by Alpines but by the dolichocephs. The occurrence of bronze tools and weapons in the interments shows clearly that the megaliths of the south of France date from the beginning of the Bronze Age. The absence of bronze from the dolmens of Brittany may indicate an earlier age. It is, however, more likely that the opening Bronze Age in the South was contemporary with the late Neolithic in the North. The construction and use of these monuments continued at least until the very earliest trace of iron appears and in fact mound burials among the Vikings were common until the introduction of Christianity.
Although there is evidence of very early use of iron in Egypt the knowledge of this metal as well as of bronze in Europe centres around the area occupied by the Alpines in the eastern Alps and its earliest phase is known as the Hallstatt culture, from a little town in the Tyrol where it was first discovered. This Hallstatt iron culture appeared about 1500 B. C. The Alpine Hittites in northeast Asia Minor were probably the first to mine and smelt iron and they introduced it to the Alpines of eastern Europe, but it was the Nordics who benefited by its use. Bronze weapons and the later iron ones proved in the hands of these Northern barbarians to be of terrible effectiveness. With these metal swords in their grasp, the Nordics conquered the Alpines of central Europe and then suddenly entered the ancient world as raiders and destroyers of cities. The classic civilizations of the northern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea fell, one after another, before the “Furor Normanorum,” just as two thousand years later the provinces of Rome were devastated by the last great flood of the Nordics from beyond the Alps.
The first Nordics to appear in European history are tribes speaking Aryan tongues in the form of the various Celtic and related dialects in the West, of Umbrian in Italy and of Thracian in the Balkans. These barbarians, pouring down from the North, swept with them large numbers of Alpines whom they had already thoroughly Nordicized. The process of conquering and assimilating the Alpines must have gone on for long centuries before our first historic records and the work was so thoroughly done that the very existence of this Alpine race as a separate subspecies of man was actually forgotten for many centuries by themselves and by the world at large until it was revealed in our own day by the science of skull measurements.
The Hallstatt iron culture did not extend into western Europe and the smelting and extensive use of this metal in southern Britain and northwestern Europe are of much later date and occur in what is called the La Tène Period, usually assigned to the fifth and fourth century B. C.
Iron weapons were, however, known sporadically in England much earlier, perhaps as far back as 800 B. C., but were very rare and were probably importations from the Continent.
“Hallstatt relics have only been found in the northeast or centre of France and it appears that the Bronze Age continued in the remainder of that country until about 700 B. C.”
The spread of this La Tène culture is associated with the Nordic Cymry, who constituted the last wave of Celtic-speaking invaders into western Europe, while the earlier Nordic Gauls and Goidels had arrived in Gaul and Britain equipped with bronze only.
In Roman times, following the La Tène Period, the main races of Europe occupied the relative positions which they had held during the whole Neolithic Period and which they hold to-day, with the exception that the Nordic subspecies was less extensively represented in western Europe than when, a few hundred years later, the so-called Teutonic tribes overran these countries; but on the other hand, the Nordics occupied large areas in eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland and Russia now mainly occupied by the Slavs of Alpine race.
Many countries in central Europe were in Roman times inhabited by fair-haired, blue eyed barbarians, where now the population is preponderantly brunet and becoming yearly more so.