2/0 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



identify them with the historic Scythians, the Scythians of 

 Herodotus. 



There are reasons, however, for thinking that the Chudes 

 may represent an earlier race, the men of the Stone Age, who, 

 migrating from north Europe eastwards, had reached the Tom 

 valley (which drains to the Obi) before the extinction of the 

 mammoth, and later spread over the whole of northern Asia, 

 leaving everywhere evidence of their presence in the megalithic 

 monuments now being daily brought to light in East Siberia, 

 Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. This view receives support from 

 the characters of two skulls found in 1895 by A. P. Mostitz in 

 one of the five prehistoric stations on the left bank of the Sava 

 affluent of the Selenga river, near Ust-Kiakta in Trans-Baikalia. 

 They differ markedly from the normal Buriat (Siberian Mongol) 

 type, recalling rather the long-shaped skulls of the South Russian 

 kurgans, with cephalic indexes 73-2 and 73*5, as measured by 

 M. J. D. Talko-Hryncewicz 1 . Thus, in the very heart of the 

 Mongol domain, the characteristically round-headed race would 

 appear to have been preceded, as in Europe, by a long- 

 headed type, presumably that of early Neolithic man every- 

 where. 



In East Siberia, and especially in the Lake Baikal region, 

 Herr Leder found extensive tracts strewn with kurgans, many 

 of which have already been explored, and their contents deposited 

 in the Irkutsk museum. Amongst these are great numbers of 

 stone implements, and objects made of bone and mammoth tusks, 

 besides carefully worked copper ware, betraying technical skill 

 and some artistic taste in the designs. In Trans-Baikalia, still 

 farther east, with the kurgans are associated the so-called Kameni 

 Babi, "Stone Women," monoliths rough-hewn in the form of 

 human figures. Many of these monoliths bear inscriptions, 



nearly the same language as the Finns: "pa Finnas, him Kihte, and ba 

 Beormas spraecon neah an ge'Seode " (Oros. I. Ch. I. 14). But these extremely 

 rude nomads could scarcely have been the somewhat cultured Chudes, that 

 "popolo mitico al quale si attribuiscono tutte le reliquie archeologiche in 

 quelle parti della Siberia e nel settentrione della Russia d' Europa" (Sommier, 

 Sirieni, Ostiacchi e Samoiedi delV Ob. Florence, 1887, p. 49). 

 1 Th. Volkov, in L? Anthropologie^ 1896, p. 82. 



