THE RACES OF EUROPE

A careful comparative study of these two crania places them both with­out difficulty into the female series of Upper Palaeolithic skulls; the great­est similarity is between number two and the female of Obercassel. Al­though the two Pritzerber crania differ widely in size and in face form, these differences can be matched in the Upper Palaeolithic group. The adult male mandible found with the Pritzerber crania is large, wide, high, and has everted gonial angles; it belongs to the same racial category as the crania. Typologically, these Pritzerber See remains are Mesolithic, for the two skulls could be female counterparts of St&ngenas, but to which of the three sub-periods they belong, we cannot tell.

The Anthropological Institute of Kiel University possesses a number of skulls from Schleswig-Holstein of purported Mesolithic age, most of which were removed from Kiel Harbor or the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, during dredging operations. Others were simply dug up from peat deposits by farmers draining their bogs. Dates of varying accuracy may be assigned to seven of these specimens; all seven belong to the physical type of which St&ngenas may be a male, and the Pritzerber See crania female, ex­amples.⁴⁰

Four of them have been dated by pollen analysis;⁴¹ three being assigned to the earliest Litorina transgression, and presumably to the very end of Period II, or Maglemose, archaeologically; and a fourth to full Litorina, thus probably Period III, or Erteb011e. The other three specimens, in­cluding the Ellerbek skull, which was dredged from submerged land in Kiel Harbor, may be dated, very tentatively, only by their associations with implements.

Thus, so far, we have found only dolichocephalic crania of European Upper Palaeolithic type associated with early post-glacial Mesolithic re­mains in northern Germany, as well as in Scandinavia. But there are other skulls, of dubious Mesolithic association, which are brachycephalic. These include the skulls of Plau, Mecklenburg; Domitz, from the bed of the Elbe; and Spandau, from the mouth of the Spree. All three could fit very easily into the brachycephalic group from Ofnet, and if they are not Mesolithic, show the northward movement of that type in later times.⁴²

Before concluding this survey of racial associations in the Mesolithic of

40. Aichel, Otto, Der deutsche Mensch. The specimens referred to are b 5, ks 11032, ks 11254b, b 38, b 34, b 37, b 10.

41. With newly exhumed skulls, Professor Aichel sent earth or peat from the cranial cavity to palaeobotanists; with specimens which had lain for years in museums, he gathered earth from the ear holes. This method does not always yield certain results, for sometimes the samples do not contain enough pollen for statistical study.

42. Clarke, j. G. D., op. Citpp. 133-136.

Reche, AFA, vol. 49, pp. 122-190.

Kossina, G., MannusB, #6a, 1928, p. 144.

Kossina, G., Die Indogermanen, MannusB, #26, 1926, p. 16.

75

northwestern Europe, we must not fail to mention the parallel situation in the British Isles. Briefly, during the Upper Palaeolithic there are no true Solutrean or Magdalenian deposits in Britain, but the Aurignacian con­tinues, to develop into an early Mesolithic culture called Creswellian. This in turn is later influenced by Azilian cultural diffusion from western France and northern Spain. The Aurignacian which came to England, and from which Creswellian developed, apparently came from central Europe.⁴³

During the Mesolithic, a northern extension of Creswellian, strongly mixed with Azilian, extended to southwestern Scotland, where it has been found in the Oban caves of Argyllshire. The deposits of some of these caves date from Late Atlantic time, subsequent to the maximum Litorina transgression, during which period the caves were formed. This would roughly correlate the remains which they contained with Period III in Scandinavia. We must remember, however, that, although a few stray Maglemosian finds have been made in eastern Scotland, the land con­necting Scotland with Denmark in the Boreal period had since sunk below the North Sea, and skeletal material from the Oban caves cannot be closely related in a cultural sense to that from Scandinavia.

During the last century, a number of these caves, when excavated, yielded skeletal material dating from the Late Mesolithic through the Bronze and Iron Ages into modern times. One of the sites, the MacArthur cave, contained some artefacts which have been recognized as Azilian,⁴⁴ as well as two male skulls, of which one at least is probably contemporane­ous with the deposit.⁴⁵

This specimen, called skull B, is very similar to the St&ngenas fragment in Sweden, with nearly identical vault dimensions, a cranial index of 70, a broad forehead, and heavy browridges. The sagittal arcs of the skull, the breadths and heights of the orbits, the depressed root of the nose, the breadth of the face, and the height of the mandible, are all typical of the purely long-headed variety of the Upper Palaeolithic European racial group. From the photographs ⁴⁶ it is possible to make further observations, and even to reconstruct tentative values of additional measurements. The bizygomatic facial breadth was greater than the breadth of the vault, and the nose was leptorrhine.

Oban man is, in short, an ideal example of the central European Aurig­nacian physical type. As far as this one specimen is concerned, the initial

40. Garrod, Miss D. A. E., RBAA, Pres. Ad., sec. H., vol. 4,1938, pp. 1-26, viz. p. 23.

41. Abb6 Breuil (PSAS, vol. 55, 1921, p. 163) states that the site is fundamentally Creswellian influenced by a strong Azilian admixture, with faint Maglemose traces.

⁴⁶ Turner, Sir W. (TRSE, vol. 51, 1914-15, pp. 211-214), states that skull B actually lay in the shell deposit, while skull A was taken from the black earth above it.

⁴⁶ Turner, p. 213.