OUR FOREFATHERS IMMIGRATION 



Accordingly, it is clear that the people who, after the end of the last Glacial 

 Period, immigrated to Sweden, and became the first inhabitants of our country, 

 must have belonged to the Cro«Magnonsrace. 



This is confirmed in a very distinct manner by the many discoveries made 

 in our country, which prove that a long-headed race, with skulls similar to those 

 of the Cro«Magnon«race, lived in Sweden more than 2,000 years before the com* 

 mencement of the Christian Era. This is further confirmed by the fact that such 

 skulls are, even at the present time, very common here. 



As the fragile skulls can be preserved for thousands of years only under very 

 favourable conditions, it is not surprising that no Swedish skulls are met with 

 from an earlier period than the later Stone Age. Already long before this, the 

 short»headed race, of which we have just spoken, had arrived to Europe. 



Although this race had not replaced the original inhabitants in the North, 

 the latter had, as is usual in such cases, more or less been blended with the 

 new*comers. As even these, as well as the former immigrants, came to Scandi» 

 navia from Central Europe, it would be a natural consequence that the short- 

 headed race was comparatively more spread in Southern Scandinavia, than further 

 North. This has just been the case. 



GusTAF Retzius and Carl Furst have described a large number of Swedish 

 skulls from the 3rd millennium B. C, and Furst has proved, that in Scania, as 

 in Denmark, the percentage of short-heads during that time was greater than in 

 Central Sweden. This is just what ought to be the consequence of my theory 

 about the primitive inhabitants of our country. 



We obtain further important confirmation of this theory from another source. 



If they who immigrated here after the end of the Glacial Period were our 

 forefathers, the names of the lakes in our country would be of Swedish origin. 



Several years before I arrived at my present opinion regarding the primitive 

 inhabitants of Sweden, Professor Heilquist of Lund had examined the names of 

 the Swedish lakes, and found that all of them, — with the exception of the Lapp- 

 landish and Finnish lakes in the most Northern parts of the country — are of 

 Swedish origin.* 



• 



Do we know anything about the time when the first immigrants arrived in 

 Sweden? Or in other words, do we know, when the last Glacial Period ended 

 here? 



The Swedish geologist Baron Gerard de Geer has, by most ingenious in< 

 vestigations of the strata which were formed when the ice-masses retreated north 

 from Scania, found that about 15,000 years have elapsed since the ice-boundary began 

 to retreat north from the most southerly shore of Scania. As we have already 

 stated, people pr obabl y cam^^ortly after the disappearance of the ice, when the 

 country was made habitable for human beings, and we can therefore say: It is 

 about 15,000 years since our forefathers began to occupy Sweden. ' 



Another question may be asked: Have any relics from this period been found 



• Elof Heliquist, »Studier ofver de svenska sjonamnen, deras harledning och histoiia*. in the xBidrag till kannedom om 

 de Svenska landsmilen och Svenskt folkIiv» (Stockholm 1903—1906). 



