Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/760

736 from the tumuli which are scattered all over Russia from the Carpathians almost to the Ural chain, and even beyond in Siberia. These Kurgans, so called, are merely large mounds of earth from twenty to fifty feet high, sometimes single, sometimes arranged in series for miles. They are not unlike the simpler relics of our own mound builders. The dead level of the country makes them in the open prairies often of great service to herdsmen in tending their flocks. These tumuli were found for the most part to date from the stone age; no implements or ornaments of metal were unearthed in them. The absence of weapons or utensils of war in the Kurgans also denoted a peaceable folk. The population must have been considerable, for these tumuli are simply innumerable. The men of this prehistoric period betrayed a notable homogeneity of type, even more uniform than that of the modern living population. The crania were almost invariably of a pure, long-headed variety; the cephalic indexes ranging as low or lower than that of the purest living Teutonic peoples to-day. Remembering that the modern Russians are well up among the moderately broad-headed Europeans, it will be seen what this discovery implied. Nothing else was known save that this extinct people were very tall, considerably above the standard of the Russian mujik to-day. The most obvious explanation, in view of the fact that Finnic place names occurred all over Russia, was that these tumuli were the remains of an extinct substratum of Finns, driven out or absorbed by the incoming Slavs. Their civilization, made known to us by Uvarof, and more recently by Inostranzef, was definitely connected with that of the Merian people, so called by the historians.

Soon a new and significant point began to be noted. While the range of this primitive long-headed people, so different from the living Russians, was distinctly set on the north and east, no definite limits could be set to it toward the southwest. In the meanwhile Kopernicky and others, from 1875 on, began to find evidence of the same dolichocephalic stratum of population, underlying all the Slavs in Podolia and Galicia. Their track has been followed, entirely antedating the modern Slavs, down into Bohemia and Moravia, by Niederle and Matiegka, and as far as Bosnia, where, in the great discoveries at Glasinac, the existence of this same aboriginal population was abundantly proved. On the west, Lissauer followed it across Prussia beyond the Vistula. Thus on every side it was traced to the