THE NEOLITHIC INVASIONS

99

shorter-headed than the small Badarians. They cannot be derived direcdy from Egypt proper, nor from any known population of the Delta, if the few Merimdian skeletons already mentioned may be considered typical of that region. This small and geographically limited group is a local form of Mediterranean of the same variety which, at a presumably earlier date, had crossed the Straits into the Iberian Peninsula.

Other remains, found in caves in eastern Algeria,²⁶ are likewise small in absolute body size, having a mean stature of approximately 160 cm., but resemble the type of T6viec rather than that of Muge. They may be attenuated Afalou survivors, but cannot with certainty be ascribed to the Neolithic. Many, if not all, may be Mesolithic in date.²⁷

The megalithic cultural complex, borne through the Mediterranean by sea in the Late Neolithic, and spreading northward past Gibraltar to the British Isles, France, and Scandinavia, reached the North African shores. But in this minor theater of megalithic activities the stone monuments, which do not occur east of Tunisia, may have been first erected in post- Neolithic times, since most of them contain objects of bronze, or even of iron. They were, in fact, occasionally used as burial vaults through Roman times, and right up until the arrival of the Moslems. Under these circum­stances we cannot expect to find a purely megalithic race in the Tunisian and Algerian dolmens²⁸ and, to a certain extent, the material lives up to expectations. Although the cranial indices, in some thirty specimens, ranges from 67 to 84, the majority of the skulls are dolichocephalic, and some of them are extremely long, while most of them are leptorrhine, unlike the broader-nosed ordinary Mediterranean crania of the Neolithic. Furthermore, the stature of the dolmen people is tall, with a male mean of about 168 cm.²⁹ Unless these are the skeletons of Hamites or Arabs, we may infer that the megalith builders were not the small Mediterraneans proper of Mesolithic tradition, but a new ethnic element which we shall be able to study more profitably when we find it in greater numbers farther to the north.

(6) The neolithic in spain and portugal

It is not easy, from a distance, to collect and review the evidence for the Neolithic population of the Iberian Peninsula. I have been able to assem­ble data on some fifty crania from Spain, and nine from Portugal, which seem, with reasonable certainty, to be of Neolithic age.⁸⁰

24. Ibid., pp. 240-242.

25. Boule, M., Vemeau, R., Vallois, H., AIPH, Mem. 13, p. 190.

26. There are very few in Morocco, and nothing is known of their skeletal contents.

27. Bertholon and Chantre, op. cit., pp. 243-249.

28. Scheidt, W., in his Die Rassen der jungeren Steinzeit in N. W. Europa, pp. 87-92, ac­cepted but 38, besides the 68 early Bronze Age crania from el Argar. Czortkower, S., the author of another compilation (PAn, vol. 8, 1934, pp. 45-52), used 118 from Spain,

100

THE RACES OF EUROPE

The Portuguese specimens, all from the Tagus Valley, can all be classi­fied as Mediterranean. They include, however, not only the small Muge type, but others with larger skulls and taller stature, as high as 168 cm. in the case of one male.³¹

The Spanish material is best represented by two series, the first from the cave of La Solana at Angostura, Segovia ⁸² (see Appendix I, col. 9), and the second from the cave of Ticuso at Sepulveda, in the same province.³³ Both of these series were originally called Magdalenian, but the presence of pottery and polished celts in the Solana cave, and of trephination at Ticuso, leave little doubt that both are really Neolithic.

The Solana series, which includes ten males and four females, repre­sents a relatively large Mediterranean type, which may be nearly duplicated in the Egyptian series from the royal tombs at Abydos ³⁴ and would also fit metrically into a Mesopotamian Eurafrican type group. Morphologically, the crania are relatively heavy, with moderately large supraorbitals.

The second series, that of Ticuso (see Appendix I, col. 10), includes fourteen male and seven female crania. These are somewhat smaller and more delicately formed than the Solana series, and resemble metrically the Naqada predynastic skulls from Upper Egypt. Smaller series and single skulls from other parts of Spain usually fall into this same category.

The human remains which represent the Neolithic period in Por­tugal and Spain, therefore, incomplete as they are, corroborate the evidence of archaeology. The Iberian Peninsula was a corridor of movements into western Europe from North Africa, and two types, at least, made use of this passageway—a small variety of Mediterra­nean, somewhat larger than the Mesolithic people of Muge, but bas­ically the same, and identical with the people who moved into the upper valley of the Nile in predynastic times; and a somewhat larger, heavier sub-division of the same race, similar to Neolithic man in western Asia, and perhaps to the early farmers of the Egyptian Delta. To what extent these two types included local Mesolithic survivors it is im­possible to tell.

which probably include el Argar. When these are subtracted his list attains exactly the same size as mine.

81. Barros e Cunha, J.-G. D., A CIA, 3me Session, Amsterdam, 1927, pp. 358-360.

Herv6, G., REAP, vol. 9, 1899, pp. 265-280.

Mendes-Correa, A., BAC, vol. 3, 1925, pp. 117-146.

Herv6 states (p. 274) that the series includes a few brachycephals, but the published data do not support this.

81. Barras de Aragon, F. de las, AMSE, vol. 12, 1933, Cuad. 1, pp. 90-123; Verneau, RDAP, 1886, ser. 3, vol. 1, pp. 10-24.

33. Hoyos Sainz, L., CRCA, 14me Sess., Geneva, 1912, vol. 2, pp. 399-408; Barras de Aragon, ibid.

34. Morant, op. cit., 1925.