THE RACES OF EUROPE

are all dolichocephalic and Mediterranean* There is no trace of negroid influence, and the skulls are said to be larger than those of predynastic Egyptians, to be described shortly.¹⁸

After this excursion let us return to Upper Egypt, to a number of sites close to that section of the valley in which the Tasians had previously lived. From the type site, Badari, come the earliest skulls of a definitely Egyptian group which have yet been discovered. These Badarians lived about 4000 B.C., after the climate had become considerably drier than it was in Tasian times, so dry, in fact, that in many cases the skin and hair of their dead have been naturally preserved. The skin was apparently brunet white, while the hair was black or dark brown in color, thick, of fine texture, and usually wavy in form.

Although the Badarians, like the Tasians and Merimdians, still hunted and fished to enhance their larders and vary their diet, they lived primarily by agriculture and by herding cattle and sheep. Unlike the Merimdians, they raised no pigs. By hammering copper they were entering the transi­tion from the Neolithic to the Metal Age. They navigated the Nile in ships, whose shapes are revealed by pottery models, but we cannot be sure that they sailed them. These Badarians were undoubtedly newcomers to Upper Egypt, who displaced the Tasians and perhaps other predecessors.

It is very difficult to identify the sexes of Badarian skulls, for the type is a delicate and feminine one, showing very little muscular development.¹⁹ For this reason, the various investigators who have measured Badarian skulls have in no two cases agreed on their sexing, and the means vary accordingly, but with the most extreme division, the sex ratios are still unusually small, even for an Egyptian series.

The Badarian series is the earliest cranial sample of any numerical length which has yet been obtained from any part of the world. It is our first series, unified in time and place, which is ample enough to be studied by accurate statistical methods. These show that the series is not very vari­able, but its variability is no less than that of many modern populations. From this Morant concludes “In the last six thousand years there appears to have been little change in the variability of racial populations.” ²⁰

The Badarian type represents a small branch of the Mediterranean racial group. The head is unusually high in comparison to the other di­mensions, and the facial skeleton is in the absolute scale unusually small; the mandible is small, narrow, and light. Its mean male bicondylar diam­eter is the smallest known, while the bigonial diameter of 91.6 mm. is also extremely low.

Although the Badarian type is definitely related to that of the succeed-

14. Derry, Douglas, sawv, Jahrgang, 1932, #1-4, pp. 60-61. 20 Ibid., p. 306.

15. Morant, g. M., Biometrika, 1927, vol. 27, pp. 293-309.