THE RACES OF EUROPE

Mediterranean, we are already familiar. Some of the Mediterranean racial contingent may well have been of earlier Spanish derivation, but if so the absence of Megalithic and Copper Age forms is surprising.

In other parts of Spain no such change of population as that of Almeria is manifest. Mediterraneans, both large and small, are carried over from the Neolithic and Copper Ages, while the larger variety of brachycephal also continues,⁴⁹ Out in Mallorca and Menorca, the dolichocephalic ele­ment seems to remain as the exclusive or predominant one, for the most part tall and of Long Barrow vault form.⁵⁰

The westward migrations of peoples from the Aegean and the eastern end of the Mediterranean, during the Late Neolithic, the Aeneolithic, and the Early Bronze Age, must have affected the populations of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics, and the Iberian Peninsula to a consid­erable degree. These were real colonizations which added new racial elements to the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic Mediterranean sub-stratum. By the middle of the Bronze Age, the central and western Mediterranean lands had assumed the racial characteristics which they still, for the most part, bear. Except for northern and central Italy, later migrations were to bring little that was new.

6. Basques, phoenicians, and etruscans

Since the western Mediterranean lands have changed little racially since the end of the Bronze Age, it may perhaps be forgiven us if we break the continuity of the present chapter, as was done earlier in the cases of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, to discuss, at this point, the origins and racial characteristics of certain non-Indo-European-speaking peoples who are or were in later times known by specific names—the Basques, the Phoenicians (as Carthaginians), and the Etruscans.

In regard to the Basques, it has been observed that the skeletons from dolmens of Guipuzcoa, probably of Early Metal Age, resemble those of the modern Euskarians of the same province, in stature, in head size and form, and in characteristic facial peculiarities.⁶¹ Since the northern shore of Spain, in the country occupied by the Basques since the beginning of history, is rich in metal ores and was a favorite haunt of Copper and Bronze Age sea migrants, it is very likely that a numerically strong western Asiatic element, including both Megalithic and Dinaric types, became a permanent factor in the local population. When we come to discuss the physical anthropology of living Basques, the probability of such an influence will be of assistance.

47. Aranzadi, T. de, Excavacio de Sepulcres Megalitics, pp. 31-39.

Barras de Aragon, F. de las, various articles in AMSE, 1921, 1926, 1930.

⁶⁰Barras de Aragon, F. de las, AMSE, vol. 9, 1930, pp. 38-51.

^w Serra i Vilaro, after Mendes-Correa, 1924.

153

The second people, the Phoenicians, who established their principal colony at Carthage at the end of the second millennium B.C., and posted trading garrisons at various points on the North African coast, both on the Mediterranean and Atlantic sides, also settled along the eastern coast of Spain, where they founded the city of Cartagena. Except for the Greeks, they formed the last of the groups to migrate westward from the eastern Mediterranean by sea, but the first to do so in full historical light.

The physical type of the Phoenicians is well known from the skeletal re­mains found in tombs at Carthage.⁵² A series of 117 skulls, of which 68 are male, belong for the most part to one characteristic type; dolicho- to mesocephalic, with the cranial index at 75; fairly long vaulted, and hence moderately broad; with a very low vault, a moderately broad forehead, a short face, high orbits, and a narrow, projecting nose which often springs directly from the frontal bone with little or no nasion depression. These skulls are in many ways similar to the Megalithic or Long Barrow type of the preceding millennium; but, as is to be expected in view of their late eastern Mediterranean origin, show modifications toward a shortening and widening of the vault, and a beaking of the nose.

A few related brachycephals, of Dinaric form, are incidental to this type, while a number of less characteristic skulls, with lower orbits and less prominent, wider noses, may be those of North African natives. The Carthaginians were apparently rather tall, with a mean male stature of 168 cm. The Greek evidence, already quoted, indicates that they were brunet.

There can be no doubt that the majority of the Carthaginians who were buried in these tombs were either the descendants of seafarers from Pales­tine and Syria, or at least immigrants from the east of similar race. Nine skulls of important men, taken from elaborate stone sarcophagi, belong to exactly the same type as the majority of the others, except that these representatives of the privileged classes had larger heads in all or most dimensions than those of the masses. This correlation between size and status, or size and opportunity, is a familiar human trait wherever there are social and nutritional differences, and has no coincident racial signifi­cance. Single Phoenician skulls from two points in the western Mediter­ranean, Melilla in the Moroccan Rif, and Ibiza in Spain,⁵³ conform exactly to the standard set by the Carthaginians.

The last of the three non-Indo-European speaking ethnic groups, the Etruscan, probably came to Italy as early as the first quarter of the tenth

^m Bertholon and Chantre, Rhherches Anthropologiques dans La Berberie Orientate, pp. 251- 266. Also:

Collignon, R., Anth, vol. 3, 1892, pp. 163-172.

Mantegazza, P., APA, vol. 6, 1876, pp. 17-29.

63. Barras de Aragon, F. de las, AMSE, vol. 9, 1930, pp. 35-64; 79-105.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

century B.C. Another wave is said to have arrived in the eighth century. The colonists apparently kept up contacts with their homeland until about 650 B.C. This homeland, according to the classical tradition, main­tained by all Greek and Roman historians from Herodotus to Pliny, was Lydia in Asia Minor. That this tradition is accurate is the belief of most modern classical scholars.⁵⁴

The cranial evidence from Etruscan tombs ⁵⁵ substantiates the belief that these non-Indo-European, non-Semitic speakers were typical ex­amples of the earlier Bronze Age population of the eastern Mediterranean. As with the earlier el Argar people of Spain, a mesocephalic mean for the cranial index covers the presence of pronounced long heads and round heads, with the two extremes, in this case, forming about equal propor­tions. Actually, the metrical characteristics of the two series are much alike, but the Etruscan skulls were a little larger, which is not surprising, for the el Argar crania were for the most part rather small.

The Etruscan skulls are notably smooth in surface relief, with little in the way of browridges; the side walls of the vaults, seen from above, are not parallel, as with the longer Mediterranean forms, but converging, with the greatest breadth in the parietals and a narrow forehead; the orbits are high and rounded, and the nose narrow. The Etruscans, with a typically Near Eastern cranial form, resemble both the Cappadocian type found in the Hittite period at Alishar, and the planoccipital brachy­cephals which appeared in the Bronze Age cemeteries of Cyprus. By Roman times these two varieties had blended, to a large extent, into a variable mesocephalic form, to which the Phoenicians as well largely be­longed.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of the migrations of eastern Mediterranean peoples by sea to Italy, Spain, and the islands between these two peninsulas in protohistoric as well as in prehistoric times. Especially in Spain and Italy, large numbers of peoples immi­grated, who added, to the basic Mediterranean population of Neolithic origin, Near Eastern elements which may still be discerned among Italians and Spaniards today. The debt of the Romans to the Etruscans, genet­ically as well as culturally, was especially great.

7. THE COPPER AGE IN EUROPE NORTH OF THE MEDITER­RANEAN LANDS: DANUBIAN MOVEMENTS AND BELL BEAKERS

While the earliest Metal Age culture was being carried westward through the Mediterranean by sea, other agencies conveyed it overland into central Europe. As before, the main highroad was the Danube Val-

⁶⁴ Schachermeyer, Fritz, Etruskische Fruhgeschichte.

66. Sergi, G., AFA, vol. 41, 1915, pp. 309-313 ff.

155

ley, but this time the center of earliest diffusion was not Bohemia, but Hun­gary. A series of crania from Bodrogkeresztir in that country ⁶⁶ are uni­formly dolichocephalic, with the highest individual cranial index, out of more than fifty examples, only 76. This is too low for Danubians of the usual Neolithic type, and one suspects a movement from the northeast of peoples of Corded origin. The common presence of copper battle-axes, red ochre, tumulus burials, and other south Russian cultural traits in Copper Age sites in Hungary ⁵⁷ would tend to confirm this deduction. In the west Corded people brought the first metal to Switzerland, and in this case crania of definitely Corded type are involved.⁵⁸

The inhabitants of Yugoslavia during the Copper Age were, like those of Hungary, also uniformly dolichocephalic.⁵⁹ Unfortunately, here also we have no further information of racial significance. As one approaches the mouth of the Danube, however, this dolichocephalic uniformity dis­appears. Four skulls from Russe, in Bulgaria, include one male of Corded type, a mesocephalic male, and two brachycephalic females.⁶⁰

From this evidence, such as it is, we may deduce that the people who brought copper into the Danube Valley at the close of the Neolithic period came from two centers, southern Russia and the Caucasus, and Anatolia, by way of Troy. The chief carriers were the Corded people or some others equally dolichocephalic, while brachycephals from Asia Minor were of little importance from the racial standpoint.

While Copper Age civilization was thus spreading westward along the Danube and the lands to the north, a countermovement in the form of the Bell Beaker invasion travelled eastward from the Rhine to the Danube, and as far as Poland and Hungary. The remains of these Bell Beaker peo­ple occupy single graves or groups of graves, rather than whole cemeteries; they were apparently wandering traders, trafficking in metals, for their gold spirals have been found in Danish graves of the corridor-tomb period. They were thus in all likelihood rivals of the Battle-Axe people in their search for amber.

It is not known how they went from Spain to central Europe. Sporadic finds in France and northern Italy suggest the Rh6ne-Rhine and the Brenner Pass routes as alternatives.⁶¹ In neither case is the evidence very satisfactory, and neither excludes the other. From the Rhine Valley as a

“ Bartucz, L.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

center, Bell Beaker expeditions moved eastward into Bohemia, Austria, Po­land, and Hungary; those who took part in these movements were even­tually absorbed into the local populations. The Bell Beaker people who remained in the Rhinelands, however, came into intimate contact with the Corded people, who had invaded from the east and northeast, and with the corridor-tomb megalithic population to the north, whose domain ex­tended down into the Netherlands. These three, of which the Bell Beaker element formed perhaps the dominant one, amalgamated to form an Early Bronze Age cultural unit, the so-called Zoned Beaker people, who invaded England and Scotland as the first important carriers of metal.

The Bell Beaker physical type is known to us from sixty or more skulls from scattered burials in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Hungary.⁶² Of these, about one-third are truly brachycephalic, while the others are, almost without exception, mesocephals. In the Rhine country around Worms, three-fourths or more of the Bell Beaker crania are brachycephalic; in Austria, one finds an equally high ratio; but in Bo­hemia and Poland the high brachycephaly becomes less frequent, and at Tokol in Hungary, in a series of ten crania, four are mesocephalic and six are dolichocephalic.⁶³

So high is the mesocephalic ratio, and except for Hungary, so infre­quent the truly long-headed crania associated with this type, that the mesocephals are clearly one branch of the main type, and not the product of local mixture with long heads. Morphologically, the mesocephals are essentially Bell Beaker.

The series of skulls from the Rhineland, including nine adult males, is the most suitable for comparison (see Appendix I, col. 21). It is identical in the cranial index mean with that of Fiirst’s forty-four male Bronze Age skulls from Cyprus, which have already been studied, and which have been called Dinaric. The Rhenish crania are a little larger in vault dimen­sions, and particularly in height; but are almost identical facially. Mor­phologically, the two groups are also similar, but the Bell Beaker group is more extreme in many ways; the browridges are often heavy, the general ruggedness frequently greater. The faces are characteristically narrow, the orbits medium to high, the nasal skeleton high and aquiline; the occiput frequently flat. The stature for six males reached the high mean of 177 cm.

82. Bartels, P., PZ, vol. 5, 1912, pp. 67-82.

Jankowsky, W., AAnz, vol. 8, 1932, pp. 104-115.

Palliardi, J., WPZ, vol. 6, 1919, pp. 41-56.

Sailer, K., ZFAE, vol. 77, #5/6, 1925, pp. 515-571.

Schliz, A., AFA, vol. 35, 1908, pp. 239-267.

Sedlaczek-Komorowski, L., BAPS, ser. B, vol. 2, 1932, pp. 253-257.

Stocky, A., and Matiegka, J., AnthPr, vol. 3, #2, 1925, pp. 138-155.

Trauwitz-Hellwig, J. von, MAGW, vol. 53, 1923, pp. 251-265.

®⁸ Bartucz, L„ MAGW, vol. 57, 1927, p. 128.