THE RACES OF EUROPE

to have lasting results in the west, the latter in the east. Unlike the Kelts and the Scyths, these two later groups, tardy to receive the civilization of the classical world, were destined to people many countries permanently with their descendants, and to implant their tongues in many regions.

Of these two, the Germanic expansion was the earlier. The period of Teutonic migration was that of the famous Volkerwanderung, which began with the precocious but futile invasion of Italy by the Cimbri and Teutons, who fought the Romans between 114 and 102 b.c., and which did not end until the adoption of Christianity by the Norwegians in the eleventh century put an end to the piratical practices of the Vikings. Its period of greatest vitality fell between the second and fifth centuries of the present era.

The home of the Germans before their expansion was only in a re­stricted sense the modern Germany. The tribes of which this people was composed occupied Denmark, southern and central Sweden, Norway, and the northern coastal strip of Germany, from the mouth of the Elbe to the Baltic shore. The islands of the Baltic near Sweden, namely Gotland and Bornholm, were densely populated.

One must not suppose that these early Germans were the unaltered descendants of their Bronze Age predecessors, for there is strong archaeo­logical evidence that a new people entered Scandinavia at the beginning of the retarded Iron Age of this region.⁶⁹ The Hallstatt artefacts are en­tirely different in character from those of the Late Bronze Age, and the burial rite changed completely, while the old nature worship which the Megalithic sea people had brought to Scandinavia now disappeared abruptly, being replaced by religious phenomena which we can associate definitely with the classical Norse style of worship. The Norse pantheon, with its family of gods and its Valhalla, is closely related to the systems of Greece and Rome, of India, and of the other Indo-European divisions.

The principal civilizing agency in the development of the Germanic culture was that of the Kelts, but the Kelts were niggardly teachers, for they blocked the Germans from direct intercourse with the classical world. It was not until the days of the Roman Empire and of the Byzantines that the Germans, after driving their way through the vanishing Keltic domain, reached these civilizing influences. But the earlier Scandinavians had already possessed a distinctive Bronze Age culture, which was not en­tirely lost.

Furthermore, certain strong cultural elements in the time of Germanic efflorescence bore strong marks of an eastern inspiration; such as the ship burials, which resembled the Royal Scythian interments in every detail except for the substitution of ships for wagons; and the art, as expressed

66. Shetelig, h., Falk, h., and Gordon, e. V., Scandinavian Archaeology, pp. 174-175.

203

in wood carving, which carried over the richness of the eastern animal style, and which reached its highest development in Norway. The Ger­mans, like the Kelts, had been subjected to a very strong influence from the plains to the east.

Linguistically, the early Germanic tongues were much in the debt of the Kelts. Many of the words needed to express new things were of Keltic origin. Hubert, the Keltic authority, believed that the Germanic lan­guages were the garbled borrowings of some Indo-European speech by a people to whom the Indo-European phonemes were difficult.⁷⁰ It is true that consonantal shifts from K to H, and the like, are more extreme than those in other Indo-European languages. It is very likely that the ances­tral Germanic speech was introduced into Scandinavia by the invaders who brought the Hallstatt culture to that backward region.

It is the task of the physical anthropologist to help the archaeologist and linguist discover the identity of these Iron Age invaders, whose arrival in Scandinavia cannot be put back earlier than the sixth or seventh cen­turies b.c. This should be relatively easy, for the newcomers buried while the older population presumably continued cremating their dead. The Danish series is the most extensive, with 42 adult male crarjia⁷¹ (see Appendix I, col. 39); of these only one has a cranial index of over 78. The series is strongly dolichocephalic, with a mean of 72.3. There is no trace of the brachycephalic element which had been so important in Denmark from the beginning of the Neolithic through the Bronze Age.

The Danish Iron Age crania form a homogeneous group. They belong definitely in the same class with the other Iron Age Nordics of Lausitz Urnfields inspiration, and more particularly the purely long-headed ele­ment in the Keltic blend, for the low vault and cylindrical transverse pro­file of the Keltic crania are also common here. Except for the lesser breadth of head and face, and greater vault length, they closely resemble the Keltic crania of Gaul and of the British Isles, and those of the Scythians, while they are virtually identical with the Armenian Iron Age skulls dis­cussed in the last section. The Danish Iron Age crania, then, are probably the same as those of the ancestral proto-Kelts before their arrival in south­western Germany, and of the ancestors of the Scythians and eastern Ira­nians. These Danes were a tall people, however, for the stature of 25 males was 171.5 cm. This agrees with that of the earlier peoples of the same re­gion, and with that of the Scythians.

In this Danish series there was, without doubt, a selection on the basis of differential methods of disposal of the dead; the numerous Bronze Age

70 Hubert, h., The Rise of the Celts, pp. 50-52.

71 Nielsen, h. A., anoh, II Rakke, vol. 21, 1906, pp. 237-318; ibid., III Rakke, vol. 5, 1915, pp. 360-365. Reworked.