In the outlying parts of Europe, perhaps even in Gaul, it is extremely doubtful whether any closer connection between race and culture exists than in the Alps. It has long been maintained that the brachycephalic people of the Round Barrows introduced bronze into Britain. Surely, as we have already shown, things point to that conclusion.[K] Beddoe, Dawkins, and other authorities maintain it at all events. Yet Canon Taylor makes it pretty evident that the new race arrived in Britain, as it certainly did in Gaul, considerably in advance of any knowledge of the metals. As for Scandinavia, much the same relation holds true. Both race and culture, as we shall see, came from the south, but it is by no means clear that they arrived at the same time or that one brought the other. In Spain, Siret has asserted that bronze came in the hands of a new immigrant broad-headed race, but the authoritative opinion of Cartailhac discovers no direct evidence to this effect.
The final conclusions which would seem to follow from our tedious summary is this: That the nearly contemporaneous appearance of a brachycephalic race and the first knowledge of metals indicative of Oriental cultural influences in western Europe, is more or less a coincidence. The first civilized peoples of the Hallstatt period seem to have been closely allied, both in physical type and culture, with the Greeks and other peoples of the classic East. Among them, perhaps over them, swept the representatives of our broad-headed Alpine type who came from the direction of Asia. These invaders may have been the Scythians, although the matter is incapable of proof. Pressure from this direction set both culture and population in motion toward the west, in much the same way that the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century induced the Renaissance in Italy.
IV. _The remarkable prehistoric civilization of Italy is due to the union of two cultures: one from the Hallstatt region having entered Europe by way of the Danube, the other coming from the southeast by sea being distinctly Mediterranean. From these evolved the Umbrian and the Etruscan civilizations, followed in the historic period by the early Latin._
The earliest culture in Italy worthy the name is found in the _palafitte_ or pile dwellings, in the northern lakes, and in the so-called _terramare_ settlements in the valley of the Po. The former are not distinguishable from similar structures in the Swiss lake dwellings, but the _terramare_ are entirely peculiar to Italy. Their like is not found anywhere else in Europe. Briefly described, they are villages built upon raised platforms of earth, encircled by a moat, and generally having a ditch or small pond in the middle, in which an altar is erected. These complicated structures are built upon the low, marshy, alluvial plains along the Po, but show many points of similarity with the true pile dwellings. The people of this early period were in the pure stone age, with few arts save that of making the coarser kinds of pottery. From their osseous remains, they seem to have been of a long-headed type, quite like their predecessors, who were cave dwellers. After a time, without any modification of the modes of construction of their settlements, new elements appear among these _terramare_ people, bringing bronze and introducing cremation. At about the same period, as we have said, the Alpine broad-headed race began its submergence of the primitive Ligurian type, leading to the formation of the north Italian population as we see it to-day. This type surely invaded Italy from the north and northeast.