Let us now see how far those skulls of the Neolithic Age which have been found in other surroundings resemble the type which is associated with long barrows.
Putting aside the Scottish skulls which have been already mentioned, they comprise specimens found in the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire and Cefn, near St. Asaph; in a chambered cairn at Tyddyn Bleiddyn, near Cefn; in caves at Rhosdigre and Llandebie, and at Uphill in Somersetshire;[1651] in the East Ham Marshes, along with two ‘chipped celts’, fifteen feet below the surface;[1652] in the bed of the Trent at Muskham;[1653] and in a submarine forest, thirty feet below the level of the sea, near the Land’s End.[1654] Skulls found in tumuli at Keiss in Caithness,[1655] in a tumulus at Towyn-y-Capel in Anglesey,[1656] and in ‘what seems to be an alluvial deposit formed by the river Dove’, near Ledbury Hall in Derbyshire,[1657] may be added doubtfully to the list;[1658] but, as we shall afterwards see,[1659] there need be no doubt that certain brachycephalic skulls of the type which is commonly associated with the round barrows belonged to the Neolithic Age.
Professor Ripley[1660] holds that the Long Barrow people were ‘quite similar to’ those whose remains have been found in caves, if ‘somewhat less extreme in physical type’; and Huxley[1661] thought that all the dolichocephalic and mesaticephalic British skulls of the Neolithic Age belonged to the same race. Similarly Dr. Garson[1662] identifies the river-bed type, represented in Britain by the Muskham skull, with that of the long barrows; while, according to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the skulls from the Welsh caves and from Tyddyn Bleiddyn ‘agree in shape ... with some of those given in Tables i. and ii. of the “Crania Britannica” as “ancient British”’,[1663] and ‘belong to that type which Professor Huxley terms the river-bed skull’,[1664] and which, according to him, was identical ‘in general characters’ with the Long Barrow type.[1665] Dr. Beddoe,[1666] on the contrary, says that both they and the Caithness skulls ‘depart considerably from the typical long-barrow cranium’, and is inclined to regard them as belonging to a distinct mesaticephalic race.[1667] The cephalic indices of the Welsh skulls, which range from 74·3 to 80,[1668] are considerably higher than those of the Long Barrow skulls in general; and (though this may be unimportant) the average height of the men to whom they belonged was ‘little more than 5 feet’,[1669] or considerably below the average height of the Long Barrow people. In my opinion neither they nor the Land’s End skull, which resembles them,[1670] are pure specimens of the Long Barrow type;[1671] and the same may be said of the East Ham and Muskham skulls. The one from Towyn-y-Capel, on the other hand, might be supposed to have come from a long barrow. The cephalic indices of the Caithness skulls range from 73 to 78. Four of them[1672] might, I think, pass muster as Long Barrow skulls; but the remaining two[1673] appear to me different. Of the Ledbury skull, the cephalic index of which is 77, Huxley himself says that ‘a little flattening and elongation, with a rather greater development of the supraciliary ridges would convert this into the nearest likeness to the Neanderthal skull which has yet been discovered’.[1674] It may be that there was some infusion of the blood of the Long Barrow race in all the people to whom these skulls belonged; but I have little doubt that if, with the few exceptions which I have noted, they were placed on a table among those of the long barrows, a skilled craniologist could pick out every one of them. The difference is easily accounted for when it is remembered that the long barrows were almost certainly erected late in the Neolithic Age,[1675] and that there were neolithic men in Scotland when the estuary of the Forth extended 8 or 10 miles west of Stirling, and when the sea relatively to the west coast was 25 feet higher than it is now.[1676]