Thirdly, Sergi, affirming that the Long Barrow people belonged to the Iberian branch of the stock which he has taught ethnologists to call Mediterranean, says,[1699] ‘I have compared the forms of the skulls from British graves with ancient.... Mediterranean skulls, and have found those characteristic of Spain, of Portugal ... of Greece, of Hissarlik, and of East Africa.’ The fact is undeniable; but obviously it does not tend to prove that the Long Barrow race belonged to the Iberian rather than to the Ligurian branch, which, according to Sergi,[1700] ‘extends from the Iberian peninsula as far as Italy,’ or to any other branch of the Mediterranean stock. Moreover, when Sergi affirms[1701] that ‘wherever the Mediterranean stock established itself, it preserved its primitive burial custom of inhumation’, and that ‘incineration was of absolutely Aryan [that is to say, on his theory, Asiatic] origin’,[1702] he weakens his argument, for it is certain that incineration was practised by many of the Long Barrow people.[1703] Furthermore, Sergi tells us that skeletons of ‘the Mediterranean type’ are characterized by ‘slender and delicate forms’,[1704] and doubtless most of the skeletons which have been found in long barrows answer to this description; but thirteen skeletons found in a chambered long barrow at Rodmarton, Gloucestershire, were distinguished by ‘powerful and vigorous frames’.[1705]
I conclude that there is not sufficient evidence for referring the Long Barrow people to the Iberian rather than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.
It is generally admitted that the Long Barrow race closely resembled in cranial characteristics, and to a lesser degree in stature, the dolichocephalic neolithic population of Gaul, of whom the people whose remains have been discovered in the caverns of l’Homme Mort[1706] and Baumes-Chaudes[1707] were perhaps the most typical representatives; and this resemblance confirms the truth of the theory that the Long Barrow people were a branch of the ‘Mediterranean’ stock. But one argument, upon which Thurnam[1708] laid great stress, should warn us to be cautious in drawing conclusions from the skeletal characters of prehistoric peoples of whose other characters we are necessarily ignorant. About the middle of the nineteenth century several skeletons were discovered in a neolithic barrow at Fontenay, near Caen. Their skulls resembled those of the long barrows; and the height of the tallest, according to Thurnam’s system of measurement, would not have exceeded 5 feet 1 inch, or 1 metre 550. This, he triumphantly remarks, confirms the opinion that the peoples who erected the sepulchral chambers at Fontenay and in the south-west of England belonged to the same race. But the average height of the Long Barrow people, according to Thurnam, was 5 feet 5·4 inches,[1709] and the average height of the brachycephalic Round Barrow people 5 feet 8·4 inches.[1710] This difference of 3 inches is one of the facts upon which he relies to prove the distinction--a distinction which is of course as certain as it is universally admitted--between the Long Barrow people and the brachycephalic Round Barrow people. Yet he regards the difference of 4·4 inches between the average height of the Long Barrow people and the tallest of the men who were buried at Fontenay as sufficient to prove the racial identity of the latter with the former!