VI. NEOLITHIC MAN

The remains of neolithic man have been discovered in caves, in cairns, in submerged forests, and in barrows in Essex, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Caermarthenshire, Denbighshire, the Isle of Man,[1623] Argyllshire and the island of Arran, Caithness, and the Orkney Islands.[1624] The neolithic population, however, it need hardly be said, were scattered over many other parts of Britain in which their skeletons have not come to light. Many anthropologists consider that all of them belong to one race; but at all events the great majority represent men of medium stature with long skulls; and it is a generally accepted article of faith that no long barrow has ever yielded any article of metal in association with a primary interment, and that no skull whose cephalic index exceeded 79, belonging to a primary interment, has ever been found in a long barrow since the time when anthropologists first began to measure skulls in this country.[1625] According to a table[1626] published by Dr. Beddoe in 1894, the value of which has been confirmed by later measurements,[1627] the cephalic indices of 87 skulls belonging to the Neolithic Age ranged from 63 to 79; and, as Dr. Thurnam points out,[1628] some of them are more dolichocephalic than those of any modern European people.

When we come to examine the stature of the neolithic Britons, we find that, according to Thurnam’s latest estimate,[1629] the average height of 25 male skeletons found by him in long barrows was 5 feet 5.4 inches,[1630] or 1 metre 661: but Dr. Beddoe gives good reasons, to which I have already called attention,[1631] for believing this estimate to be too low; and his own is 5 feet 6.7 inches, or 1 metre 694.[1632] Recent measurements (although they include those of individuals under 5 feet) do not invalidate the evidence of these figures;[1633] and the few Scottish skeletons which undoubtedly belong to the Neolithic Age have yielded practically the same results.[1634]

Dr. Garson, describing the dolichocephalic Long Barrow skulls, with which anthropologists agree in associating those that have been found in the ‘horned cairns’ of Caithness,[1635] in the neolithic cairns of the isle of Arran,[1636] and in the caves of Oban,[1637] says that ‘the superciliary ridges and glabella [the surface between the superciliary ridges] are moderately or even feebly developed ... the malar [or cheek] bones are never prominent ... there is no tendency to prognathism ... as a whole the face is oval in form; the jaws are small and fine ... the facial characters are mild and without exaggerated development in any direction’.[1638] It may be added that the Long Barrow skulls, as Thurnam pointed out, are ‘more or less depressed—platycephalic’,[1639] and that the nose is usually aquiline.

The general truth of the foregoing descriptions will be apparent to any one who examines the plates in Crania Britannica; but we must take account of exceptions. As Dr. Davis pointed out,[1640] a skull found in the Long Lowe barrow, near Wetton in Staffordshire, is very different from another dolichocephalic skull from a chambered long barrow at Uley in Gloucestershire.[1641] In the latter the brow ridges are strongly marked, and the chin is comparatively broad and square.[1642] Of another skull, found in a barrow near Littleton Drew in North Wiltshire, Thurnam observes that the lower jaw is ‘thick and heavy’.[1643] A third, taken from a barrow at West Kennet in North Wiltshire, has an amazingly angular and square lower jaw, which, as Thurnam truly says, ‘deviates considerably from the normal type.’[1644]

Again, while the average stature of the Long Barrow skeletons which Thurnam examined was, according to the higher estimate of Dr. Beddoe, only 5 feet 6·7 inches,[1645] and Rolleston affirmed that he had ‘never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 6 inches ... in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the stone and bone period’,[1646] a skeleton found in the West Kennet barrow had a thigh bone 20 inches long;[1647] and its possessor would therefore have stood 6 feet high, or nearly 1 metre 830, on the lowest computation, and, according to the estimate of Dr. Beddoe, 6 feet 1½ inch or 1 metre 867. Not less remarkable is a dolichocephalic skeleton of almost identical dimensions,[1648] described by Dr. Garson, which, although it was found in a round barrow, undoubtedly belonged to the Neolithic Age.[1649]

It is evident, therefore, that although not one of the people, so far as we can tell, who buried their dead in long barrows was brachycephalic in index, yet not only was there a very wide range in their indices, but some of them were strikingly different, both in form of skull and feature and in stature, from the normal type. Were they the result of crossing between individuals of the Long Barrow race and tall brachycephalic invaders who will be noticed later? Thurnam himself pointed out that a male skull, whose cephalic index was 79, found in a primary interment in the long barrow of Charlton Abbot’s in Wiltshire, was ‘unquestionably brachycephalous’.[1650] The mere fact that its index was below the conventional limit did not blind him to its true character.

Let us now see how far those skulls of the Neolithic Age which have been found in other surroundings resemble the type which is associated with long barrows.

Putting aside the Scottish skulls which have been already mentioned, they comprise specimens found in the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire and Cefn, near St. Asaph; in a chambered cairn at Tyddyn Bleiddyn, near Cefn; in caves at Rhosdigre and Llandebie, and at Uphill in Somersetshire;[1651] in the East Ham Marshes, along with two ‘chipped celts’, fifteen feet below the surface;[1652] in the bed of the Trent at Muskham;[1653] and in a submarine forest, thirty feet below the level of the sea, near the Land’s End.[1654] Skulls found in tumuli at Keiss in Caithness,[1655] in a tumulus at Towyn-y-Capel in Anglesey,[1656] and in ‘what seems to be an alluvial deposit formed by the river Dove’, near Ledbury Hall in Derbyshire,[1657] may be added doubtfully to the list;[1658] but, as we shall afterwards see,[1659] there need be no doubt that certain brachycephalic skulls of the type which is commonly associated with the round barrows belonged to the Neolithic Age.

Professor Ripley[1660] holds that the Long Barrow people were ‘quite similar to’ those whose remains have been found in caves, if ‘somewhat less extreme in physical type’; and Huxley[1661] thought that all the dolichocephalic and mesaticephalic British skulls of the Neolithic Age belonged to the same race. Similarly Dr. Garson[1662] identifies the river-bed type, represented in Britain by the Muskham skull, with that of the long barrows; while, according to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the skulls from the Welsh caves and from Tyddyn Bleiddyn ‘agree in shape ... with some of those given in Tables i. and ii. of the “Crania Britannica” as “ancient British”’,[1663] and ‘belong to that type which Professor Huxley terms the river-bed skull’,[1664] and which, according to him, was identical ‘in general characters’ with the Long Barrow type.[1665] Dr. Beddoe,[1666] on the contrary, says that both they and the Caithness skulls ‘depart considerably from the typical long-barrow cranium’, and is inclined to regard them as belonging to a distinct mesaticephalic race.[1667] The cephalic indices of the Welsh skulls, which range from 74·3 to 80,[1668] are considerably higher than those of the Long Barrow skulls in general; and (though this may be unimportant) the average height of the men to whom they belonged was ‘little more than 5 feet’,[1669] or considerably below the average height of the Long Barrow people. In my opinion neither they nor the Land’s End skull, which resembles them,[1670] are pure specimens of the Long Barrow type;[1671] and the same may be said of the East Ham and Muskham skulls. The one from Towyn-y-Capel, on the other hand, might be supposed to have come from a long barrow. The cephalic indices of the Caithness skulls range from 73 to 78. Four of them[1672] might, I think, pass muster as Long Barrow skulls; but the remaining two[1673] appear to me different. Of the Ledbury skull, the cephalic index of which is 77, Huxley himself says that ‘a little flattening and elongation, with a rather greater development of the supraciliary ridges would convert this into the nearest likeness to the Neanderthal skull which has yet been discovered’.[1674] It may be that there was some infusion of the blood of the Long Barrow race in all the people to whom these skulls belonged; but I have little doubt that if, with the few exceptions which I have noted, they were placed on a table among those of the long barrows, a skilled craniologist could pick out every one of them. The difference is easily accounted for when it is remembered that the long barrows were almost certainly erected late in the Neolithic Age,[1675] and that there were neolithic men in Scotland when the estuary of the Forth extended 8 or 10 miles west of Stirling, and when the sea relatively to the west coast was 25 feet higher than it is now.[1676]