wild and domestic animals, stag, roe-deer, and hare, along with the dog, pig, domestic horse, short-horned ox, and goat. The domestic animals largely predominated, proving that the community was pastoral rather than living by the chase. We may also note among the wild animals, found in the refuse on the floor of the caves, the bear and the wild boar. On the floor, in each of these caves, were numerous human skeletons of all ages, belonging to bodies that had been buried in a contracted posture, and at different times,

Fig. 4. Neolithic Skull (Lent by Messrs. Macmillan)

in association with a Neolithic axe (Fig. 3), splinters of flint, and fragments of coarse, unornamented, handmade pottery. The settlement is therefore of Neolithic Age. The caves had originally been used for habitation and afterwards for burial, and the remains of the refuseheap, that first drew attention to the spot, mark the site of the huts forming the settlement.

The human skulls are all of the long-oval type (Fig. 4), and the community clearly belongs to the

same race.1

1 For details see Dawkins, Cave-Hunting, p. 149, etc.

This discovery led to the exploration of the burial places belonging to another Neolithic settlement, in the Valley of the Elwy, at Tyddyn Bleiddyn, near Plas yn Cefn, St. Asaph, in 1869-71.1 Here, in

Section along line AB

Fig. 5.-Chambered Tomb, Cefn, St. Asaph

a large cairn composed of limestone fragments, the dead lay buried in two chambers, made of slabs set on edge, and roofed with horizontal slabs, each being approached by a narrow passage or gallery formed in the same way, and each being packed with skeletons

in the contracted posture, and of various ages. In Fig. 5 one of the chambers is represented in plan and section. In them there was the same mixture of domestic and wild animals as at Perthi Chwareu, along with splinters of flint. In both the skeletons are of the same peculiar type, and indicated that this region of North Wales was inhabited, in the Neolithic Age, by herdsmen of the same race, living on their flocks and herds and also by hunting, and dwelling in caves and in huts, and burying their dead in caves and cairns.

The following Table of the discoveries at Perthi Chwareu and at Cefn,' shows that both communities belong to the same Neolithic Age:-

Neolithic habitations and tombs, not only in Wales but throughout the British Isles and the Continent. It is probable also that the margins of the Welsh Lakes were fringed with pile-dwellings, similar to those of Ireland and Switzerland, although the sole example on record in Wales, in the lake at Llangorse, is as yet undated.

The human skeletons in these two groups of burial places belonged to a singularly uniform type.

40

In

41

42

Fig. 6.-Neolithic Skull

(Lent by Messrs. Macmillan.)

stature they varied from 5 ft. 6 in. to 4 ft. 10 in.; their skulls (Figs. 4 and 6) were of good capacity and of long, oval type; their faces oval, noses aquiline, and jaws small and not projecting beyond a vertical dropped from the forehead.

Some of the leg bones present peculiarities that are only now found in tribes who freely use the muscles of their feet, uncontrolled by any stiff sole or sandal. We may, therefore, infer that their possessors either were bare-footed, or wore only mocassins, like the Red Indians.

This small slenderly-built race occupied the whole of Wales, Britain, and Ireland in the Neolithic Age, and has been traced through the whole of Belgium, France, Spain, and Italy. Among living peoples, as I have shown elsewhere, they are physically identical with the inhabitants of the Basque provinces of France and of Spain, who speak a non-Aryan tongue, and represent, at all events, one of the tribes that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula and South-Western France at the dawn of history. We may, therefore, infer that the Neolithic aborigines in Wales were, like the Basques, of dark complexion, and with black hair, and closely related, ethnically, to the Iberians, and that they possessed those physical characters that induced Tacitus to describe the Silures, probably on the authority of his father-in-law Agricola, as reminding him of the Iberians of Spain. In my opinion, the Silures, at the time of the Roman conquest of Wales, stood in the same relation to the other tribes that the Vascones in Gaul and in Spain stood to the neighbouring peoples when they fell under the Roman power. We may conclude that the small, dark element in the Welsh people now sporadic in Wales, as it is in the highlands of Scotland, in the west of Ireland, in England, and generally in South-Western Europe, is due to their descent from this small, dark, non-Aryan race, that were masters of Middle and South-Western Europe in the Neolithic Age, before the great invasion of the tribes speaking an Aryan tongue, which we know as Celtic. In Italy they may be recognised in the small swarthy section of the ancient Etruscans, as well as in the dark peoples now occupying the peninsula.

In Crete1, in the Peloponnese, and in Asia Minor they are represented by the seafarers, the builders of Mycenae, Tiryns, and of Troy, who spread the Egean civilisation far and wide over the Mediterranean, in

1

Dawkins, Annual of British School at Athens, 1900-1, p. 150.