_Sweden in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times--Archæological Finds and Classical Testimony_
The Swedes, although the oldest and most unmixed race in Europe, realized very late the necessity of writing chronicles or reviews of historic events. Thus the names of heroes and kings of the remotest past are helplessly forgotten, and lost also the history of its earliest religion and institutions.
But Mother Earth has carefully preserved most of what has been deposited in her bosom, and has repaid diligent research with trustworthy and irrefutable accounts of the age and various degrees of civilization of the race which inhabited Sweden in prehistoric times. Thus it has been proved that Sweden, like most other countries, has had a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. But there is absolutely no evidence to prove the now antiquated theories of various immigrations into Sweden by different races on different stages of civilization. On the contrary, the graves from the remotest times, through all successive periods, prove by the form of the skulls of those buried in them that Sweden has, through all ages, been inhabited by the same dolichocephalic, or long-headed, race which constitutes the overwhelming majority of her people to-day.
Sweden, physically considered, is not of as high antiquity as some countries of Europe. Yet it has been inhabited during the last four thousand years, at least. In the quaternary period the Scandinavian peninsula was a centre of a glacial movement which spread its disastrous influences over Western Russia, Northern Germany and Holland. In that period no vegetable or animal life was possible in Sweden. From the fact that the earliest stone celts found in Sweden and Denmark are not polished, archæologists were led to suppose that the Stone Age of the North was contemporaneous with the Palæolithic civilization in Western Europe. But this standpoint has been found untenable, because it has later become evident that the fauna surrounding the earliest inhabitants of the Northern countries was ours and not a quaternary one.
The oldest types of finds of _the Stone Age_ in the North have been discovered in the refuse-heaps on the Danish coast. These refuse-heaps, consisting of stone implements, shells, bones, etc., do not occur in Sweden, but the implements characteristic of them are found scattered over some parts of the southernmost Swedish province of Scania. The shape of these earliest finds is exactly the same as of those of the later Stone Age, the only difference being that the former are not polished. But there are transitions between the classes, and the act of polishing must be regarded as an important phase of progress.