Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/464

450. Eight sepulchral caves have been discovered within as many miles of the village of Les Eyziès alone in the Vézère valley. Because of this geographical concentration of a peculiar type in this region, it has become known by the name of the Cro-Magnon race, since in the cave of this name the most perfect specimens were found.

The geographical evidence that here in Dordogne we have to do with the real Cro-Magnon race is fully sustained by a comparison of the physical characteristics of the crania here discovered in these caves in the valley of the Vézère with the peculiar living type we have above described. The original Cro-Magnon race was extremely dolichocephalic; as long-headed, in fact, as the modern African negroes or the Australians. The cranial indices varied from 70 to 73, corresponding to a cephalic index on the living head between 72 and 75. This was and is the starting point for the theory that the Mediterranean populations are an offshoot and development from the African negro. The only other part of Europe where so low an index has been located in the living population is in Corsica, where it descends almost to this level. The people of Dordogne do not to-day range quite as long-headed as this, the average for the extreme commune of Champagnac being 76. This difference need not concern us, however, for within the whole population are a large proportion with indexes far below this figure. Close proximity to the very brachycephalic Alpine type, just over the line in Corrèze, would account for a great deal larger difference even than this. Probability of direct descent becomes almost certainty when we add that the Cro-Magnon head was strongly disharmonic, and very low-skulled. The modern population does not equal its progenitors in this last respect, but it approaches it so distinctly as to show a former tendency in this direction. The skull was elongated at the back in the same way—a distinguishing trait which appears prominently upon comparison of the profile view of a modern Cro-Magnon type with that of its Alpine neighbors, as we have already observed. The brows were strongly developed, the eye orbits were low, the chin prominent. The noted anthropologist, De Quatrefages, prophesied what one of these types ought to look like in the flesh. I give his description in his own words, that its agreement with the facial type above represented may be noted: "The eye depressed beneath the orbital vault; the