Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/349

] this respect, then, the historical narrative agrees with the conclusions at which we have arrived from the distribution of the human remains over the Continent. The relative antiquity also of the two races in Europe is settled. The Iberians were the possessors of the land from which they were ultimately driven by the invasion of the Celtic peoples farther and farther to the south-west into those fastnesses in which they were compelled to make a stand by the waters of the ocean.

This invasion of the regions west of the Rhine took place, as we have seen, in the Neolithic age, and long before the dawn of history in those regions. In the days of Cæsar the Belgæ possessed the country from the Seine and Marne as far north as the Scheldt, and pressed upon the Celtæ, with whom they were probably closely related in language and physique. They were in their turn pushed to the west by the advance of the Germans in the Rhine provinces. Thus we have the oldest population, or the Iberian, in the western parts of France and Spain, being pushed farther and farther westward by the Celts; the Celts in their turn by the Belgæ; and these again by the Germanic tribes. The Neolithic aborigines are in the west; and the relative positions (Fig. 112) of the three peoples mark their relative antiquity in Europe.

An appeal to the ancient history of Britain reveals the same elements in the population in the same relative