And chronology '

MAP

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THE RACES OF EUROPE

Map 2 will show, in a very general sense, the time scale of Neolithic invasions into Europe, and the routes by which these invasions may have come. It is to be noted that Crete became Neolithic before any of the European mainland, followed by Greece and the land near the Bospo­rus; eventually these agriculturalists spread into all the northern Mediter­ranean lands by sea. Meanwhile, other Neolithic farmers had been moving along the coast of North Africa from Egypt, and had crossed over Gibraltar to invade Spain. Hence they migrated northward and eastward, as far as the Swiss lakes and the Rhine.² Their agriculture, and their pig, sheep, and cattle husbandry, eventually spread over most of western Europe, and even into England. At the same time still other farmers, in this case coming from Anatolia, or southeastern Russia, or both, were moving up the Danube, and eventually established themselves in the fertile valleys of Moravia and Bohemia, and even farther westward until they met the stream coming northward over Gibraltar.

These three movements were the primary invasions which brought a new, agricultural population into Europe. Later in the Neolithic there were two other movements of a different character. One was that of the Megalith-builders, who sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar and skirted the western shores of Europe to the British Isles and Scandinavia. These seafarers probably introduced the new economy to the northern isles and Scandinavia. Then there were the Corded people, so-called on account of the decoration on their pottery—who came from some mysterious point in southern Russia or the steppes of western Asia north of the plateau, and who were probably less dependent on farming than on pastoral nomadism and trade. Just as the Megalithic people carried civilization to the far western corners of Europe by sea, so the Corded people intro­duced the new enlightenment into the north, where the old hunting and fishing life survived.

Five invasions, then, converging on Europe from the south and east, brought a new population to Europe during the third millennium B.C., and furnished the racial material from which living European populations are to a large extent descended.

2. The neolithic and the mediterranean race

In Europe, the Neolithic is primarily the period of the Mediterranean race, in one form or another. It was, apparently, the Mediterraneans who accomplished the change to a food-producing economy elsewhere, and who expanded into the territory of the food-gatherers.

These Mediterraneans, while surprisingly homogeneous in some re­spects, may be segregated locally and typologically into sub-groups on ^a Menghin, O., Weltgeschichte der Steinzeit, pp. 294-302.

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the basis of a few characters. Before proceeding much further with our geographical-historical reconstruction, it will be well to define what we mean by Mediterranean, to compare it with other races which we have already met, and to specify its principal subdivisions.

By Mediterranean, in the skeletal sense alone, we mean the wide family of closely knit racial types which are long headed, orthognathous, meso- rrhine or leptorrhine, narrow faced, and of medium head size, descended from the general Galley Hill stock, and related to Combe Capelle and Afalou #28. Mediterranean, in this sense, is the name by which we pro­pose to designate that one of the two major racial elements, concerned with the development of white peoples, which completely lacks Neanderthaloid ancestry. It differs from the major Upper Palaeolithic group of Europe and northern Africa in several respects, as shown on page 84.

The “Mediterranean” racial family is just as “white,” in the larger meaning of the word, as the Upper Palaeolithic family. Its chief differ­ences from the latter are: a smaller brain size, a moderate body size, and a lack of the excessive specializations which characterize the northern group. The Mediterranean group seems to be of purely sapiens ancestry, without Neanderthaloid or other mixture.

Before the Neolithic, the principal branches of the Mediterranean family must already have come into existence. Some Mediterraneans were probably white skinned, and others brown; it is also possible that the differences in hair and eye color which so strongly distinguish living Mediterranean sub-varieties had already come into existence.

We cannot speak with authority about Nordics until we meet blondism in the flesh, nor make profitable surmises about them until we find it in literary references and artistic representations. We must not, therefore, let differences in pigmentation and soft parts confuse our understanding of the skeletal unity of the Mediterranean race.

It can be shown that Sumerians who lived over five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia are almost identical in skull and face form with living Englishmen, and that predynastic Egyptian skulls can be matched both in a seventeenth century London plague pit, and in Neolithic cist-graves in Switzerland. Modern dolichocephalic whites or browns are very similar in head and face measurements and form. The Nordic race in the strict sense is merely a pigment phase of the Mediterranean.³

On the basis of the material to be covered in this chapter, we may dis­tinguish the following branches of the general Mediterranean or Galley Hill group:

• Popularly, the word “Nordic” is frequently applied to a blond or pigmentally inter­mediate conglomerate type or group of types in northern Europe, which contains other than blond Mediterranean elements.