PREHISTORIC MAN. 295 



speculation with regard to the probable authors of this 

 " iEgean " system of culture. It only remains, therefore, 

 to indicate, equally briefly, the present state of our know- 

 ledge of the ethnography of the Mediterranean from the 

 time when it first becomes traceable. 



83. The Mediterranean basin, as we know it, results 

 from the reunion of at least three detached basins by the 

 resubmergence of the land barriers which had joined Europe 

 and Africa in pliocene times. An approximate date for their 

 submergence may be inferred from that of the isolation and 

 rapid disappearance of characteristic African fauna on the 

 north side of the reunited basin. The human occupation 

 of the same north or European side may have been simi- 

 larly interrupted by the same climatic changes which extin- 

 guished the African fauna in the same area. 



84. But exceptions to this theory of a general separation 

 of Palaeolithic from Neolithic man on European sites have 

 been recently supplied by deposits of the Baousse Rousse 

 caves in the Riviera, which were at first taken to be of early 

 Neolithic date, but have since been recognised as strictly 

 transitional ; the human remains being of Neolithic type ; 

 the associated objects still quite Palaeolithic in character. 



85. On the south side of the Mediterranean the evi- 

 dence is at present fragmentary, and derived from areas 

 which are not yet half explored ; but both a late Palaeo- 

 lithic and a very early matured Neolithic civilisation are 

 already indicated at a number of points. The geographical 

 circumstances also indicate that there existed formerly 

 in North Africa a very much wider area of habitable country 

 than now, and a comparatively favourable climate for a long 

 though not exactly measurable period. 



86. The geographical and archaeological hints are am- 

 ply borne out by the morphological data. From Somali-land 

 and Abyssinia, through Egypt, Libya, and Mauretania, to 

 the Canaries, the fundamental type of the native population, 

 ancient and modern, is from east to west practically 

 identical, though from north to south a negroid taint is 

 increasingly perceptible, and though, besides this, marked 

 varieties of complexion and facial feature have been re- 



