CROMAGNON

RACE  , the name given by Paul Broca to a type of mankind supposed to be represented by remains found by Lartet, Christy and others, in France in the Cromagnon cave at Les Eyzies, Tayac district, Dordogne . At the foot of a steep rock near the village this small cave, nearly filled with debris, was found by workmen in 1868 . Towards the top of the loose strata three human skeletons were unearthed . They were those of an old man, a young man and a woman, the latter's skull bearing the mark of a severe wound . The skulls presented such special characteristics that Broca took them as types of a race . Palaeolithic man is exclusively long-headed, and the dolichocephalic appearance of the crania (they had a mean cephalic index of 73.34) supported the view that the " find " at Les Eyzies was palaeolithic . It is, however, inaccurate to state that brachycephaly appears at once with the neolithic age, dolichocephaly even of a pronounced type persisting far into neolithic times . The Cromagnon race may thus be, as many anthropologists believe it, early neolithic, a type of man who spread over and inhabited a large portion of Europe at the close of the Pleistocene period . Some have sought to find in it the sub-stratum of the present populations of western Europe . Quatrefages identifies Cromagnon man with the tall, long-headed, fair Kabyles (Berbers) who still survive in various parts of Mauritania . He suggests the introduction of the Cromagnon from Siberia, " arriving in Europe simultaneously with the great mammals (which were driven by the cold from Siberia), and no doubt following their route." See A . H .

Keane's Ethnology (1896) ; Mortillet, Le Prehistorique (1900) ; Sergi, The Mediterranean Race (19o1) ; Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times, p . 317 of 1900 edition .