October 4, 19 17] 



NATURE 



«7 



invaders of Scotland. Of the more ancient 

 Scots, those who buried their dead in chambered 

 cairns in the latter part of the Neolithic period, 

 he had only ten examples, five of these being 

 borrowed from Prof. Bryce's Arran series. 

 These chambered-cairn men are as different from 

 the short-cist men in head form as men can be ; 

 the people from the chambered cairns have the 

 same cranial shape and dimensions as the people 

 of the long barrows of England, Turner 

 accepted the opinion that both were of the same 

 race and that they were traceable to a Mediter- 

 ranean stock. One cannot help being impressed 

 by the length and relative narrowness of the face 

 of the more ancient Scottish skulls ; we seem to 

 see in them already the peculiar traits so com- 

 mon in the faces of modern Scots. 



Sir William Turner had at his disposal two 

 crania which may possibly belong to an earlier 

 date than the skulls from the chambered cairns. 

 They were found by the late Dr. Joseph Ander- 

 son, when he discovered and opened the 



MacArthur cave at Oban in i< 



We know 



that the MacArthur cave was inhabited at the 

 very earliest phase of the Neolithic period,' but 

 as one of the skulls was on the floor of the cave 

 and the other — a very remarkable skull — was 

 ■only embedded in the upper shelly stratum, we 

 •cannot be certain that they represent the ancient 

 inhabitants of the cave. They are both of the 

 Neolithic Scottish type. The more deeply em- 

 bedded cave skull has a remarkable resemblance 

 to that of Robert Burns ; as seen in profile they 

 are almost identical. The cave skull has the 

 remarkable length of 205 mm., that of Burns 

 2o(y mm. ; they are almost identical in height of 

 "Vault, but there is a decided difference in width — 

 that of the cave skull being 138 mm,, while 

 Burns's cranium had a width of 155 mm. The 

 poet had an enormously capacious skull. The 

 ■essential differences between the few Neolithic 

 Scots we know of and their modern successors 

 lie in an increased stature and an increased 

 ■width of head in the latter. 



Of the people who lived in Scotland in the 

 ■early Iron age, the people who succeeded the 

 short-cist round-heads. Sir William Turner had 

 to own we know almost nothing. They 

 apparently burnt their dead. But he accepts on 

 faith that with the introduction of iron a Celtic 

 people came — a long-headed race, which gave the 

 modern impress to the Scottish type. It is pos- 

 sible, as Sir W^illiam Turner agreed, that the 

 Tiuman remains discovered by Dr. Edward 

 Ewart on the shores of the East Lothian in 191 1 

 may represent people of the early Iron age ; in 

 all their physical characters they are akin to the 

 Scots of the Neolithic period. When Sir William 

 Turner came to examine the skulls of the modern 

 'Scottish people he found that the cemeteries on 

 the East Coast — particularly in Fife and in the 

 Lothians — carried convincing evidence that the 

 short-cist stock was not extinct. In some cases 

 — particularly in Fife — there were communities 

 in which the round-heads still formed 50 per 

 •cent, of the inhabitants and more ; of seventy- 

 NO. 2501, VOL. 100] 



I nine skulls from cemeteries in the Lothians 

 25 per cent. were brachycephalic, while 

 amongst thirty-one skulls from Renfrew, on the 

 western side of the country, there was not one. 

 The course of twenty or thirty centuries had 

 failed to diffuse the round-headed invaders of 

 the Bronze age among the more ancient long- 

 headed people of the west. He admitted 

 that there must be a Welsh, a Danish, 

 a Scandinavian, and a Saxon element ,xn 

 the modern Scottish, but he would have been 

 the first to admit that the origin of the real bulk 

 of the Scottish people — the descendants of 

 Gaelic-speaking ancestors — remains still an 

 enigma. 



We have now to turn for a moment to the 

 conclusions reached by the Anthropological 

 School of the University of Glasgow. From his 

 exploration of the chambered cairns of Arran and 

 of the south-west of Scotland Prof. Bryce 

 draws certain definite inferences.* He finds the 

 prototype of their burial cairns in the north of 

 Ireland ; we may infer that 4000 years ago or 

 more there existed already a connection and inter- 

 course between the peoples of the north of Ire- 

 land and the south-west of Scotland. He 

 agrees that these chambered-cairn Neolithic folk 

 were of the Mediterranean stock; their culture 

 Is of the South. He is further of opinion that 

 when these cairn people were entering the back 

 door of Scotland on the west the short-cist, round- 

 headed people from the Continent were entering 

 the frorit door on the east. The east and the 

 west met in Scotland, but to what degree they 

 mixed we have already seen from Sir William 

 Turner's investigations. How far the west was 

 left untouched by the round-heads, and the extent 

 to which the English and the West Scottish have 

 been evolved from a mixture of similar human 

 stocks, have been brought out vividly by the in- 

 vestigations of Dr. Matthew Young, at one time 

 assistant to Prof, Bryce. In 1916 Dr, Young 

 published a monograph ^^ describing the dimen- 

 sions, characters, and variations seen in a collec- 

 tion of skulls — above 600 in number — derived from 

 a comparatively modern burial ground in 

 Glasgow. In this swatch of the modern popu- 

 lation of that great city he found that the round- 

 heads amounted to only 22 percent,, against 25 to 

 30 per cent, presented by several cemeteries on the 

 East Coast, The most remarkable result of his 

 labours, however, was the discovery of a close 

 similarity between the Glasgow skulls and the 

 collection from Whitechapel described by the late 

 Dr, W. R. Macdonell. The degree of resem- 

 blance will be seen by comparing some of the 

 chief mean measurements of skulls of adult 

 males : — 



Bizyjfo- 

 matic 

 Max. Max. Average width Length of 



length wiHih height efface upper face 



mm. mm. mm. mm. mm. 



Glasgow ,., 187-5 '39"5 i'7'o 127 709 

 Whitechapel 18906 140-6 114 59 130 701 



* Scottish Historical Revirtv, April, 1905, p. 275 : Proc. Soc. of Antiii- of 

 Scotland, IQ03, p. 75- 



10 "A Contribution to the Study of the Scottish Skull." Trans. Roy. 

 Soc. Edin., 1916, vol. li., p. 347. 



