63

2. The midden-d wellers of the tagus

Although, during the last century, many skulls have been removed from caves in various parts of Spain, not one of them may be assigned with complete security to the Mesolithic period. Since Spain was apparently the main if not the only highroad of migration northward from Africa into Europe during the Mesolithic, this gap in our knowledge is ex­tremely unfortunate, particularly in view of the parallel deficiency in Morocco.

Late Mesolithic skeletons have, however, been found in Portugal, in a series of shell-heaps which lie on a raised shore near the village of Muge, on the eastern bank of the Tagus River, some fifteen miles upstream from the head of tide-water. At the time of occupation, the shellfish which the midden-builders ate lived in salt water,¹⁴ and the land must have lain several meters lower than its present level. This sinking may probably be correlated with the formation of the Litorina Sea, which lasted in what is now the Baltic from 5600 to 2500 B.C. If this dating applies to Portugal, the Muge middens were probably formed nearer the end of this period than its beginning. The safest dating for this site is immediately pre- Neolithic,¹⁵ if not early Neolithic, in the third millennium B.C.

Over two hundred human skeletons have been removed from these middens at various times during the last eighty years. Of this number, however, only nine have been measured and published in such a way that we may profitably consider them here.¹⁶ In the past, many curious ideas have been circulated about the racial types represented by these remains, and these notions have been widely credited and frequently repeated. The principal misconception has been that the Muge crania include two types: a non-European negroid, and a hyperbrachycephal variously called Alpine and mongoloid.

Actually, there is no evidence to show among them a greater negroid tendency than is commonly found among many living Europeans of Mediterranean extraction, while the so-called “brachycephalic” skulls are probably all or almost all mesocephalic, since some were badly warped

14. Obermaier, H., Fossil Man in Spain, p. 325.

¹⁶ Obermaier, op. cit., p. 325, says: “The fauna of these deposits does not include any domestic animals—except perhaps the dog—and consists of wild cattle, deer, sheep or goat, horse, swine, dog or wolf, felines, badger, civet, and hare.” (Italics are mine.) The Iberian Peninsula is not known, at the period in question, to have sheltered either wild sheep or wild goats. The only animal which could possibly have been mistaken for either is a diminutive ibex, the bones of which are much smaller than those of either sheep or goat. Unless the bones in question are actually those of ibex, the Muge midden- dwellers must have already met the first waves of the Neolithic economy from North Africa. Agriculture and domestic animals did not necessarily enter the Iberian Penin­sula in one magnificent sweep; scattered families of herdsmen may have wandered over as an advance guard.

16. Vallois, Henri V., Anth, vol. 40, 1930, pp. 337-389.