Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/131

Rh whether from the so-called Anglian districts or Saxon parts of England, present such marked contrasts that anthropologists are unable to ascribe them all to one race of people. A minority of those found in ancient cemeteries in Sussex, Wiltshire, and the Eastern Counties, present such typical differences from the majority in each district as to leave no doubt that they represent a variety of race or people descended from a fusion of races. The easiest explanation of this is, of course, to turn to the ancient Briton, and generally the remote Briton of the Bronze Age known as the Round Barrow man. Where in early cemeteries Saxon or Anglian skulls have been found presenting characteristics which are clearly not of the Teutonic type, the early British inhabitant of the Bronze Age has usually been called in as an ancestor. The typical old Teutonic skull is dolichocephalic, the skull of the British people of the Bronze Age in brachycephalic. The inference that there was a fusion of race between the Saxons and Angles and people descending from men of the Bronze Age is easily drawn. There is, however, one difficulty. The Britons of the Bronze Age lived about 500 B.C., a date which may fairly be taken to represent the time of the Round Barrow men. The Angles and Saxons are usually said to have come here not earlier than about 500 A.D. There are, therefore, a thousand years between the two periods, and in that interval was the period of the Roman rule, during which men of almost every Roman province served with the legions in Britain, and in many recorded cases some of them settled here, and presumably left descendants. In view of this racial fusion which must have gone on, it is difficult to believe that the Romano-Briton of the early Anglo-Saxon period possessed the same skull characteristics as the much more remote man of the Bronze Age, who may not have been his ancestor at all. Moreover, the Welsh also, who may be supposed to be descended from this later British stock, are not broad-headed.