The general truth of the foregoing descriptions will be apparent to any one who examines the plates in _Crania Britannica_; but we must take account of exceptions. As Dr. Davis pointed out,[1640] a skull found in the Long Lowe barrow, near Wetton in Staffordshire, is very different from another dolichocephalic skull from a chambered long barrow at Uley in Gloucestershire.[1641] In the latter the brow ridges are strongly marked, and the chin is comparatively broad and square.[1642] Of another skull, found in a barrow near Littleton Drew in North Wiltshire, Thurnam observes that the lower jaw is ‘thick and heavy’.[1643] A third, taken from a barrow at West Kennet in North Wiltshire, has an amazingly angular and square lower jaw, which, as Thurnam truly says, ‘deviates considerably from the normal type.’[1644]
Again, while the average stature of the Long Barrow skeletons which Thurnam examined was, according to the higher estimate of Dr. Beddoe, only 5 feet 6·7 inches,[1645] and Rolleston affirmed that he had ‘never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 6 inches ... in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the stone and bone period’,[1646] a skeleton found in the West Kennet barrow had a thigh bone 20 inches long;[1647] and its possessor would therefore have stood 6 feet high, or nearly 1 metre 830, on the lowest computation, and, according to the estimate of Dr. Beddoe, 6 feet 1½ inch or 1 metre 867. Not less remarkable is a dolichocephalic skeleton of almost identical dimensions,[1648] described by Dr. Garson, which, although it was found in a round barrow, undoubtedly belonged to the Neolithic Age.[1649]
It is evident, therefore, that although not one of the people, so far as we can tell, who buried their dead in long barrows was brachycephalic in index, yet not only was there a very wide range in their indices, but some of them were strikingly different, both in form of skull and feature and in stature, from the normal type. Were they the result of crossing between individuals of the Long Barrow race and tall brachycephalic invaders who will be noticed later? Thurnam himself pointed out that a male skull, whose cephalic index was 79, found in a primary interment in the long barrow of Charlton Abbot’s in Wiltshire, was ‘unquestionably brachycephalous’.[1650] The mere fact that its index was below the conventional limit did not blind him to its true character.