The arguments which have been brought forward in favour of the theory that the Long Barrow race belonged to the Iberian branch of the Mediterranean stock may be summarized as follows:--First, according to Tacitus,[1685] the Silures, a British tribe which in his time inhabited what is now Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire, and Herefordshire, were dark and had curly hair, from which fact, as well as from their geographical position, he inferred that Iberians, that is inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula, had migrated into Britain.[1686] But if the dolichocephalic Iberians were dark, so were the brachycephalic people who settled in Gaul in the Neolithic Age: Tacitus’s geographical argument was based upon the notion, prevalent among the ancient geographers,[1687] that Spain was ‘opposite’ and near Britain; and it is of course incredible that people should have sailed in the Neolithic Age from Spain to our island.
Secondly, much stress has been laid upon the alleged resemblance of the Long Barrow skulls to those of the Basques, the assumption being that the latter were Iberians, properly so called. Dr. Garson affirms that there is ‘a strong similarity between Basque skulls and those of the Neolithic people of Britain’;[1688] while Thurnam[1689] points out that the skulls of the Basques are very ‘similar in many respects to the skulls from chambered long barrows of South-West Britain’, and that the Long Barrow skulls in general closely resemble ‘sixty Basque skulls lately added to the collection of the Anthropological Society of Paris’.[1690] Moreover, Dr. Beddoe[1691] says, ‘Many photographs of Basques ... are recognized, both by myself and by an observant Welsh anthropologist to whom I have submitted them, as being in no respect different from some of the ordinary types of feature in South Wales.’
Now, as I have shown elsewhere,[1692] the investigations which have been made regarding the cranial characters of the Basques have led to widely different results; and Dr. Garson does not say to what group of Basque skulls he refers. Both the Spanish and the French Basques, according to Dr. Collignon,[1693] differ in certain respects from all other European peoples; but they also differ from each other, the former being generally dolichocephalic, while the latter are (according to Broca’s notation)[1694] sub-brachycephalic, and their cranial capacity is considerably less than that of their Spanish brethren. Dr. Collignon is inclined to assimilate the Basques generally to the Kabyle type.[1695] Assuming that the Long Barrow race resembled the Spanish Basques in certain respects, the resemblance only tends to show that the ancestors of the Long Barrow race came from the south. The ancestors, or rather some of the ancestors of the Basques were undoubtedly Iberians,--in one sense of the word: but the French Basque type which Dr. Collignon has described, and which he regards as original,[1696] is in many respects different from that of the long barrows, which ethnologists call Iberian; and, as I have shown elsewhere,[1697] the purest French Basques are generally fair, the Spanish Basques are less dark than other Spaniards, and the Long Barrow race were undoubtedly dark. Moreover, many ethnologists overlook the fact that the language of the so-called Iberian inscriptions, which have been found scattered over the territory that belonged to the Iberians, cannot be interpreted by the aid of Basque,[1698] and shows no trace of kinship with Basque.