ABSTRACT
The spread of microlithic culture in general has been attributed to wide movements of migration, especially from the south-west of Europe northwards and eastwards. Un certainty about Capsian immigrants into Southern Spain clouds the idea of a North African invasion, but there can be little doubt that from Iberia itself and from South-West Europe in general bands of Mesolithic hunters and fishers moved northward and into Central Europe, though it is difficult to say how far the physical type of the inhabitants was thereby more greatly diversified. Immigration from the east has also been claimed, since our central mountain zone is later found populated by the broad-headed, stocky, brunette type of the ‘ Alpine race’, as yet ill-defined in the Palaeolithic, and Asia is regarded as the home of broad-headedness. At the cave of Ofnet in Bavaria an extraordinary deposit of skull-burials, showing the use of red ochre remarked on earlier (p. 38), and garnished with perforated shell and deer-tooth ornaments, displays not only long head-forms very possibly re lated to the ‘ Briinn race’ of the Gravettian (p. 31), but also a range of broader types which look like early forms of ‘ Alpine’. The culture here is certainly Mesolithic and perhaps Azilian, but while such types occur elsewhere also at this time, the much earlier skulls of Solutre (p. 33) warn us against believing that broad-headedness was a Mesolithic novelty in Europe. The ‘ Dinaric’ of South-Eastern Europe has indeed usually been reckoned a relatively late comer from a welldefined home in Anatolia, but the main Alpine block may cover elements of long-standing European formation. Thus it is not surprising that broad-as well as long-headed people should now have followed the retreating ice northward. Some indeed see here an origin for the Lapps, and in general, though the Mesolithic evidence is not very adequate, it seems fairly clear that the main constituents of ‘ Nordic’ Europe must in this period have been moving together. Among them the dominant ‘ Teutonic’ element, tall and long-skulled, is now
52 certainly in evidence. Its exact antiquity in the north is not yet too firmly attested, but the general case for its distribution from the south-east, with an Asiatic centre in the remoter background, seems hard to reconcile with at all late dates. And archaeology points here no less than elsewhere to the Mesolithic as the main vital period in the setting-out of the human map of Europe.
