[hill-tout] PHYLOGENY of MAN 53 



width ranges between seventy-five and eighty per cent, of their 

 length are termed mesocephaHc, and those whose width is above 

 eighty per cent, constitute the brachycephalic type. It has been 

 found that the British type is a remarkably constant one having an 

 index ranging only between seventy-seven and seventy-nine per cent. 

 It is thus seen to fall within the mesocephalic class and to reveal a 

 slight tendency toward the dolichocephalic type. This is just what 

 we should expect to find from the known history of the race. The 

 British are a composite people, the result of the admixture of the 

 three Neolithic races of Europe^ — two long-headed and one round- 

 headed peoples. Hence their slight tendency toward dolichocephaly. 



In the cephalic index, then, we have discovered a valuable and 

 reliable test of race. By its means we distinguish the various peoples 

 of Europe today and likewise the peoples of the past; and by its 

 means we learn that the three great racial groups dwelling in modern 

 Europe are the lineal descendents of the three pre-historic races that 

 inhabited it in the Neolithic age, their respective cephalic indices 

 corresponding one with the other in a very remarkable manner. 

 Such being the case and keeping in mind the persistence of types, it 

 is not difhcult for us to discover what were the characteristics of 

 these three Neolithic peoples from our knowledge of the physical 

 characters of their modern representatives. 



We learn that one of these races — the northernmost — was a 

 fair, blue-eyed people, with rather narrow acquiline noses. Its 

 stature was somewhat less in Neolithic times than it is now, stature 

 being a variable character and subject to relatively rapid changes, 

 but its head form was practically the same then as today — ^distinctly 

 dolichocephalic. This is the race we now call the Teutonic or Baltic, 

 or Nordic. 



We learn also that the southernmost — ^the Mediterranean race — 

 was in coloring the direct opposite of the northern race. They were 

 a distinctly brunette people, with dark eyes and hair, rather broad 

 noses and slender long heads of a marked dolichocephalic type. 



Ripley holds the opinion that these two long-headed peoples, 

 notwithstanding their marked dififerences in coloring, may have had 

 a common origin ; that is to say, both were probably derived from the 

 earlier long-headed people who inhabited western Europe in Palaeo- 

 lithic times. He is inclined to regard them as variant types of one 

 common stock and explains the distinctive fairness and greater 

 stature of the Teutonic peoples of today as the result of a relatively 

 long isolation in northern Europe, of the environmental influences 

 there encountered and of artificial selection. Other students hold 



