A female skull, belonging apparently to the Neolithic Age, was discovered about the year 1891 ‘on the Batten promontory, near Plymouth Sound’.[1677] According to the report of the discovery, it ‘approaches dolichocephaly’. A photograph of this skull[1678] reminded me of some of the illustrations of round skulls in _Crania Britannica_. To quote from the report,[1679] ‘the most striking features of the face are the great size of the orbits, the strongly marked superciliary ridge, the lowness of the retreating forehead’; and all these features are characteristic of some of the most typical Bronze Age skulls.
A few years ago Professor Macalister said that he had not recognized any skulls of the Long Barrow type in Ireland,[1680] where no such barrows exist; but several specimens have since been found.[1681]
There is, as we have seen, reason to believe that the neolithic population of Britain were not homogeneous; but, with the qualifications that have been already noted, it may be truly said that the people of the long barrows present a uniform type. Whence did they come, and what were their affinities? The view which may be said to hold the field, although it is not universally accepted,[1682] is that they belonged to the so-called ‘Iberian’ race. Before we discuss this theory, it may be well to warn the reader that among those who hold it are writers who have absolutely no knowledge of ‘the Iberian question’ except on the side of physical anthropology. The word ‘Iberian’, as used by ethnologists, is not always confined to the Iberians of history, that is, the inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula and of Southern Gaul between the Pyrenees and the Rhône:[1683] it is often loosely applied to a people, possessing certain common physical features, who inhabited various parts of the Mediterranean basin, and, according to some writers, notably Sergi,[1684] penetrated in late quaternary and neolithic times into almost every country of Europe. And when it is applied by ethnologists to the Iberians of history, it is not applied to all of them, for the Iberians of history were of course a mixed people: the ethnologists are thinking only of those Iberians who belonged to the dolichocephalic Mediterranean stock.