EARLY MAN IN SCOTLAND 197 



Neolithic predecessors and the present inhabitants of Britain. 

 Many of the tibiae also possessed a retroverted direction of 

 the head of the bone ; but the plane of the condylar articular 

 surfaces was not thereby affected, so that the backward 

 direction of the head exercised no adverse influence on the 

 assumption of the erect attitude. 



Whilst in England the Bronze Age round barrows are 

 numerous and the burials in short cists are comparatively 

 rare, in Scotland the opposite prevails. Whilst part of Dr. 

 Thurnam's aphorism, viz. " long barrows, long skulls," applies 

 to both countries ; the remaining part, " short barrows, short 

 skulls," should be modified in Scotland to " short cists, short 

 or round skulls." 



The presence of dolichocephalic skulls in the interments 

 of the Bronze Age shows that the Neolithic people had 

 commingled with the brachycephalic race. Similarly the 

 Bronze men, though subject to successive invasions by 

 Romans, Angles, and Scandinavians, have persisted as a 

 constituent element of the people of Great Britain. The 

 author has found a strong brachycephalic admixture in the 

 crania of modern Scots in Fife, the Lothians, Peebles, and 

 as far north as Shetland. In 116 specimens measured, 29 

 (i.e. one-quarter) had a length-breadth index 80 and up- 

 wards, and in five of these the index was more than 85. 



The question has been much discussed whether the 

 people of the Polished Stone Age were descended from the 

 men of the Ruder Stone Age, or were separated from them 

 by a distinct interval of time. The latter view has been 

 supported by Professor Boyd Dawkins, who contends that 

 there is a great zoological break between the fauna of the 



o <-> 



Palaeolithic -Pleistocene period and that of the Neolithic 

 Age, and that the two periods are separated from each other 

 by a revolution in climate geography, and animal life. 1 



Undoubtedly many large characteristic mammals of the 

 Palaeolithic fauna had entirely disappeared from Britain and 

 Western Europe, but some nine or ten species, as the otter, 

 wolf, wild cat, wild boar, stag, roe, urus, and horse, were 

 continued into the Neolithic period ; at which time the dog. 



s> 



1 "Cave Hunting" and in "Journal of Anthropological Institute," vol. 

 xxiii. , February 1894. 



