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Post by Atlantid on Sept 5, 2012 12:22:55 GMT -5
An extract from The Languages in Britain and Ireland (2000, John Wiley & Sons) by Professor emeritus Glanville Price:
''We know no more about the languages of the Neolithic people than about those of their predecessors. Two eminent Celtic scholars, John Morris-Jones and Julius Pokorny, argued vigorously (Jones 1900; Pokorny 1926–30) that Welsh and Irish respectively have many syntactical features that are not generally characteristic of the Indo-European languages but which do have striking parallels in the Hamitic languages of North Africa, and in particular in ancient Egyptian and its descendant, Coptic, and in Berber. They point out that anthropological evidence is consistent with the view that some pre-Celtic stratum in the population could have migrated to Britain from North Africa via Spain and France and are therefore led to the view that the features in question are derived from a pre-Celtic and probably Hamitic substratum. What this implies is that, when the incoming Celts interbred with the pre-Celtic population, a mixed language resulted which was basically Celtic but which contained syntactical features carried over into it from the other languages.''
* Morris-Jones, J. 1900. ''Pre-Aryan syntax in insular Celtic''. In Rhys, John and Brynmor-Jones, David (eds), The Welsh People (4th edn, London, 1906), 617–41.
* Pokorny, J. 1926–30. ''Das nicht indo-germanische Substrat im Irischen''. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 16 (1926–7):95–144, 231–66, 363–94; 17 (1927–8):373–88; 18 (1929–30):233–48.
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Post by Atlantid on Sept 5, 2012 13:39:43 GMT -5
Chapter: Who were the ''Ancient Britons''? from Celtic Myth and Legend by Charles Squire (1905): ''The earliest of these two races would seem to have inhabited our islands from the most ancient times, and may, for our purpose, be described as aboriginal. It was the people that built the "long barrows"; and which is variously called by ethnologists the Iberian, Mediterranean, Berber, Basque, Silurian, or Euskarian race. In physique it was short, swarthy, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and long-skulled; its language belonged to the class called "Hamitic", the surviving types of which are found among the Gallas, Abyssinians, Berbers, and other North African tribes; and it seems to have come originally from some part either of Eastern, Northern, or Central Africa.''www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cml/cml07.htmChapter: Dawn of Civilization from Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald A. Mackenzie (1907): ''The early settlers came from North Africa, which was possessed by tribes of the Mediterranean race. They were light-skinned "long heads" of short stature, with slender bodies, aquiline noses, and black hair and eyes. [...] The early settlers spread through western Europe, and are known to history as the Iberians. They also met and mingled with the tribes branching along the seacoast from Greece. Moving northward through the river valleys of France, the Iberians crossed over to Britain, absorbing everywhere, it would appear, the earlier inhabitants who survived the clash of conflict. These were the men of the Late Stone Age, which continued through vast intervals of time.''www.sacred-texts.com/egy/eml/eml06.htm
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Post by Atlantid on Sept 5, 2012 16:05:05 GMT -5
Professor Grafton Elliot Smith's classic text The Ancient Egyptians (1911, p. 58, Harper & Brothers):
''So striking is the family likeness between the early Neolithic peoples of the British Isles and the Mediterranean and the bulk of the population, both ancient and modern of Egypt and East Africa, that a description of the bones of an Early Briton of that remote epoch might apply in all essential details to an inhabitant of Somaliland.''
Archaeologist Harold Peake, in his The Bronze Age and the Celtic World (1922, p. 29, Benn Brothers) notes:
"Now the Egyptians and the other peoples of North Africa are considered by all anthropologists as typical members of the Mediterranean race [...] who reached Spain about 7000 BC, and formed the bulk of the population of the British Isles about 5000 BC.''
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Post by Noah on Sept 7, 2012 6:40:54 GMT -5
Carleton Coon on the Megalithic builders, from The Races of Europe (1933): "Megalithic: Tall stature, means 167-171 cm., slender build; skull length over 190 mm.; cranial index 68-72 means, individual range below 78; vault moderate in height, less than breadth; forehead moderately sloping, browridges often of moderate heaviness, muscular markings stronger, skull base wider, face medium to long, nose leptorrhine, mandible often deep and moderately wide. The East African Elmenteitans represent an individual and extreme form of this. It represents a gerontomorphic or sexually differentiated Mediterranean or Galley Hill form, and in cranial features is closer to Galley Hill itself than any other branch[...]
The Long Barrow population formed a distinct, homogeneous type; one different from any which, to our knowledge, had previously inhabited the British Isles since the days of Galley Hill; and one which cannot be duplicated, except as an element in a mixed population, anywhere on the western European continent. One is, therefore, led to conclude that the Megalithic cult was not merely a complex of burial rites which diffused without visible carriers; and also that the bearers of this complex avoided mixture by coming by sea.
In stature and bodily build, the Megalithic people belong to a large variety of Mediterranean. The stature for a large number of males from England ranges about a mean of 167 or 168 cm.; which is not contraverted by the meager evidence from Scotland and Ireland. Four male skeletons from a single burial in Kent may represent, more nearly than most, the Windmill Hill group; they are somewhat shorter than the rest.
The Long Barrow skulls are large for a Mediterranean sub-race, but not as large as those of the Upper Palaeolithic peoples. They are particularly long, moderately narrow, and of medium height. Unlike that of the Corded skulls, the height is less than the breadth. In most instances, the occiput projects far to the rear; the parietals are parallel; the forehead is moderately sloping, and, in contrast to the restricted skull width, very straight and broad.
The face is of medium length and of moderate width; the orbits are of medium dimensions, and in many instances slope downward and outward, as if the confines of the face were too narrow for them. The nasion depression is of medium depth, under browridges of medium development; and the straight-profiled nose is leptorrhine. In its totality, the Long Barrow type is both extreme and striking.
In looking for related populations of equal age, we may eliminate at once the smaller, less dolichocephalic branches of the Mediterranean race proper, including the Danubian. A few individual crania in Neolithic Spain and Italy would qualify, but none of the series from these countries. The standard Egyptian crania, as groups, are all too small, as is the single lady from Greece. In one particular feature, the nasal index, the Long Barrow people resemble the Egyptians more than most of the more northerly Mediterraneans, for the Long Barrow crania are leptorrhine.
In their extreme dolichocephaly, the Long Barrow skulls resemble the Corded group, but the comparison does not hold for all features - the Long Barrow skulls are slightly longer, considerably broader, and much wider of forehead, than the Corded specimens, and, of course, the vault of the Long Barrow skulls is much lower. As far as one can tell, the orbits in the two series are much the same, while in regard to the faces, there is not enough evidence in the Corded group for a valid comparison.
A true and valid similarity, however, may be found between the English Long Barrow series and the early skulls from al 'Ubaid in Sumeria, which, whether belonging to the fourth or third millennium B.C., are in either case older than their British counterparts. The only difference, which prevents identity, is that the Mesopotamian faces and noses are somewhat longer.
The current idea that the Long Barrow people were directly derived from the Upper Palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain is clearly erroneous. The Long Barrow skulls are definitely smaller, shorter, and narrower than those of the Upper Palaeolithic group, but of equal or greater height; they have the same forehead breadth, the same upper face height, but a smaller jaw, a much narrower face, and narrower orbits. There is probably a genetic linkage, over a long period of time, between the Long Barrow or Megalithic type and an early Galley Hill or Combe Capelle variety of European man, but the continuity could not, for historical reasons, have taken place in England.
The few crania from the Scottish seashores belong to the standard Long Barrow type, and the same may be said of the one surely Neolithic specimen from Ireland the male vault from Stoneyisland, Portumna, County Galway. The male skull from Ringabella, County Cork, which is perhaps also Neolithic, is likewise of Megalithic race, while the disputed Kilgreany specimen, whatever its age, is, although low vaulted, also basically of a Galley Hill Mediterranean type. However, the large mandible of the latter, and its low vault, make it atypical, so that it, like two skulls from Phoenix Park, Dublin, which may be Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, is not wholly characteristic of the Long Barrow race, and may derive its peculiarities from either a Mesolithic or an Early Bronze Age source. We must repeat, in view of these aberrances, that the only surely Neolithic skull in Ireland is of Long Barrow race.
The Megalithic Long Barrow people must have come by sea, and they probably came from somewhere in the Mediterranean. They did not find the British Isles uninhabited, and their homogeneity, in a few restricted localities, cannot mean that they caused the extinction of earlier peoples. Nor did they, when still later invasions of another physical complex reached the British Isles, become extinct. The mountains of Wales, the hills of Cornwall and Devon, and almost the whole of Ireland, remain a blank in our early skeletal map of the British Isles[...]
The Neolithic manner of living differs radically from that of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic man, since it involves the production of food by agriculture and animal husbandry. The plants and animals themselves are not of European origin, but are native for the most part to western Asia. Neolithic civilization had probably begun in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and possibly the Indus Valley by 5000 B.C. The people who discovered or invented this control over nature probably belonged to the purely sapiens branch of the white race in the larger sense, including a group of related dolicho- or mesocephalic types which did not form part of the more specialized European and North African Upper Palaeolithic group, although they were closely related to such generalized forms as Galley Hill and Combe Capelle.
Members of this larger racial group invaded Europe from several quarters, starting in the latter part of the fourth millennium B.C. Their principal avenues of approach were from North Africa through Spain, from the Mediterranean to western Europe by sea, across the South Russian plains, and up the Danube Valley. The Danubian migration may have been fed by streams from north of the Black Sea, from Anatolia by way of the Bosporus, from southern Anatolia and points farther south and east by way of Greece, or by some combination of these three. The exact source or sources of the Danubian migration remain to be determined. Another avenue was to Greece and Italy from the east by sea.
The invaders may be divided into a number of sub-types. First, there is a basic cleavage into a short-statured, sexually undifferentiated, relatively small-headed and frequently mesocephalic variety which fits most closely the specifications of the Mediterranean race in the more commonly used sense of that term. There were three groups of Neolithic culture bearers who belonged principally if not entirely io this type: the Danubians; the farmers and swineherds who moved westward along the fertile coastal regions of North Africa, and over into Spain and thence northward to France and Switzerland; and the sea-borne settlers of Italy, and probably also of Greece. The Danubians are distinguished by a particularly high cranial vault and high nasal index; the western branch by a lower vault and narrower nose. To the latter class belonged also the ancient Egyptians.
The other half of the Neolithic Mediterranean race is noted for tall stature and a more extremely dolichocephalic skull form. This variety was found in East Africa; it was also common in early Mesopotamia and Iran, while the Egyptians belonged more nearly to the smaller Mediterranean variety. This tall, longer-headed half of the race is longer faced, narrower nosed, and less delicate in bony structure than the other. It also seems to fall closer to such possible prototypes as Galley Hill and Combe Capelle from the Palaeolithic.
This tall branch is again sub-divided. One sub-branch, with moderate vault and face heights, travelled, in all likelihood, by sea from the eastern Mediterranean to Gibraltar, around Spain, and up to western France, Britain, and Scandinavia. In the last two countries, and especially in the British Isles, it contributed an important element to the population. It is not easy to find the prototype of this Megalithic group; some of the Mesopotamians seem to have been very close to it metrically, and some East Africans as well; we shall later find evidence of it on the shores of the Black Sea. For the moment we can only postulate that it came from some as yet unidentified part of southwestern Asia, southeastern Europe, or northeastern Africa."
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