Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/326

310 because it represents a complete reversal of the earliest theories on the subject. Retzius, in 1842, from a comparison of the Scandinavians with the Lapps and Finns, propounded the hypothesis that the latter broad-headed brunette types were the relics of a pre-Aryan population of Europe. Their comparative barbarism confirmed him in this view. It seemed to be plain that this Mongoloid or Asiatic variety of man had been repressed to this remote northern region by an immigrant blond, long-headed race from the southwest. Nilsson adopted this view; it was stoutly maintained by Pruner Bey in France, and most leading authorities of the day. Then began the discoveries of abundant prehistoric remains all over Europe, particularly in France. These with one accord tended to show that the European aborigines of the stone age were not Mongoloid like the Lapps after all, but the exact opposite. In every detail they resembled rather the dolichocephalic negroes of Africa. The only other races approaching them in long-headedness are either the Eskimos, whom Boyd Dawkins believes to be a relic of this early European people, or else the Australians. Mr. Huxley long ago asserted these savages in turn to be our human progenitors. We need not stop to discuss either of these radical opinions. It is sufficient for us that Broca finally dealt the death blow to the older view in 1868 by the evidence from the caves of Périgord, the very district where our living Cro-Magnon type still survives, as we have already shown.

This dolichocephalic substratum has been traced all over Europe with much detail in the neolithic or late stone age, by which time the geography and the flora and fauna of the continent had assumed in great measure their present conditions. "We know that the long-headed races, now found living on the northern and southern outskirts of Europe, in Spain, southern Italy, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, once occupied territory close up to the foot of the high Alps on every side. Remains of it have not yet been found in the mountains themselves, although closely hedging them in on every side. For example, Zampa, Nicolucci, and Sergi have alike collected evidence to prove that the whole basin of the Po River, now a strongly brachycephalic center, was in the nelithic period populated by this long-headed type. In other words, Italy, from end to end, was once uniform anthropologically. For France, a recent summary of the human remains of the late stone age, based upon nearly seven hundred skeletons or skulls, shows an overwhelming preponderance of this long-headed type. The roundheads were almost entirely absent in the beginning, as in our last article we showed them to have been