THE ARRIVAL OF MAN IN EUROPE. 13 



they were not introduced into Europe gradually and one by one, but suddenly 

 and en masse. It is clear, therefore, that they must have been brought in from 

 Asia by the Neolithic men; and the same is true of the four kinds of wheat, two 

 of barley, the millet, peas, poppies, apples, pears, plums, and flax, which grew 

 in the gardens and orchards of Neolithic Switzerland. 



This rudimentary Neolithic civilization was spread all over Europe, with the 

 exception of the northern parts of Russia and Scandinavia ; and there can be no 

 doubt that it lasted for a great many centuries. It certainly lingered in Gaul 

 and Britain long after the valley of the Nile had become the seat of a mighty 

 empire ; perhaps even after the Akkadian power had established itself at the mouth 

 the of Euphrates, and " Ur of the Chaldees " had become a name famous in the 

 world. Still more, it is clear that the Neolithic population has never been swept 

 out of Europe, like the Cave-men and the River-drift men who had preceded it, 

 but has remained there, in a certain sense, to this day, and constitutes a very 

 important portion of our ancestry. 



So many skeletons have been obtained of the men and women of the Neo- 

 lithic period that we can say, with some confidence, that the whole of Europe 

 was inhabited by one homogeneous population, uniform in physical appearance. 

 The stature was small, averaging 5 feet 4 inches for the men, and 4 feet 11 inchest 

 for the women ; and the iigure was slight. The skulls were " dolicocephalic," 

 or long and narrow ; but the jaws were small, the eyebrows and cheek-bones 

 were not very prominent, the nose was aquiUne, and the general outline of the 

 face oval and probably handsome. In all these points the men of the Neolithic 

 age agree exactly with the Basks of northern Spain, the remnant of a population 

 which at the dawn of history still maintained an independent existence in many 

 parts of Europe. By their conquerors, the Kelts, who led the van of the great 

 Aryan invasion of Europe, these small-statured Basks were known as "Iberians " 

 or "westerners" (Gael /z/^r, Sanskr. avara, "western"), and "Iberian" is now 

 generally adopted as the name of the race which possessed the whole of Europe 

 in the Neolithic age and until the Aryan invasions, and which still preserves its 

 integrity in the httle territory between the Pyrenees and the Bay of Biscay. The 

 Iberian complexion is a dark olive, with black eyes and black hair ; so that we 

 may figure to ourselves with some completeness how the prehistoric inhabitants of 

 Europe looked. 



It is probable that in Neolithic times this Iberian population was spread not 

 only all over Europe, but also over Africa north of the Desert of Sahara ; so that 

 the Moorish and Berber peoples are simply Iberians, with more or less infusion 

 of blood from the Arabs, who conquered them at the end of the seventh century 

 after Christ. And it is also probable that the Silures of ancient Britain, the Lig- 

 urians of southern Gaul and northern Italy, and the rich and powerful Etruskans 

 all belonged to the Iberian race. 



In very recent times — probably not more than twenty centuries before Christ 

 — Europe was invaded by a new race of men, coming from central Asia. These 

 were the Aryans, a race tall and massive in stature (the men averaging at least 5 



