Dr. Keane[1711] maintains that the route followed by the people who introduced the neolithic culture into the British Isles is indicated by the dolmens which abound in many parts of Northern Africa, and are scattered along the western side of the Spanish peninsula and over nearly the whole area of France. This is also the opinion of Professor Flinders Petrie, who affirms that ‘the dolmens belong to one continuous series, passing from Syria, along North Africa, and up Spain to Western Europe’,[1712] of Montelius,[1713] Sophus Müller,[1714] and Sergi.[1715] Penka, on the other hand (I quote from Mr. J. L. Myres’s exposition of his views), ‘reads the series the other way,’ because ‘while on the north these monuments go back into the Stone Age, in France and the south they belong to the Bronze Age’. He observes that ‘the discovery of dolmens in North Africa and Syria ... has proceeded _pari passu_ with the discovery both of actual survival of a tall blond dolichocephalic race in the same areas, and of evidence in Egyptian portraiture of its wider extension in the second millennium B.C.’ He maintains therefore that the earliest dolmen-builders were dolichocephalic blonds, speaking an Aryan language, in Southern Scandinavia and Denmark.[1716]
Now the ethnological problem presented by the distribution of the dolmens is exceedingly difficult; and it is not certain that either of the above-mentioned views is right. Dolmens are found not only in the countries which have been already mentioned, but also in Japan, India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Moab, Asia Minor, the Crimea, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, and the Balearic Islands;[1717] and it is possible that in certain other countries their non-existence may be due simply to lack of the necessary stones.[1718] In the territory which corresponds with ancient Gaul there are no dolmens east of the line formed by the Jura and the Vosges;[1719] while the departments in which they are most numerous form a band extending obliquely from Finistère to Gard, that is, from the Channel to the Mediterranean.[1720] The single department of the Morbihan contains more megalithic monuments, including menhirs, or single standing stones, than all the other departments put together; but in the list of dolmens it ranks below Aveyron and Ardèche.[1721] In the Spanish peninsula almost all the dolmens are concentrated in Portugal, the north-eastern corner of Spain, and the southern and eastern seaboard: in Southern Britain they are found in Cornwall, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and Northumberland, in Monmouthshire,[1722] Herefordshire, and Wales;[1723] while in Scotland they are represented by the horned cairns of Caithness and the chambered cairns of Orkney, Inverness, Argyllshire, Arran, and other islands.[1724] In Ireland they are everywhere, but most numerous in the west.[1725]