(Chapter IV, section 5)
Other remains, found in caves in eastern Algeria,26 are likewise small in absolute body size, having a mean stature of approximately 160 cm., but resemble the type of Téviec rather than that of Muge. They may be attenuated Afalou survivors, but cannot with certainty be ascribed to the Neolithic. Many, if not all, may be Mesolithic in date.27 The megalithic cultural complex , borne through the Mediterranean by sea in the Late Neolithic, and spreading northward past Gibraltar to the British Isles, France, and Scandinavia, reached the North African shores. But in this minor theater of megalithic activities the stone monuments, which do not occur east of Tunisia, may have been first erected in post-Neolithic times, since most of them contain objects of bronze, or even of iron. They were, in fact, occasionally used as burial vaults through Roman times, and right up until the arrival of the Moslems. Under these circumstances we cannot expect to find a purely megalithic race in the Tunisian and Algerian dolmens28 and, to a certain extent, the material lives up to expectations. Although the cranial indices, in some thirty specimens, ranges from 67 to 84, the majority of the skulls are dolichocephalic, and some of them are extremely long, while most of them are leptorrhine, unlike the broader-nosed ordinary Mediterranean crania of the Neolithic. Furthermore, the stature of the dolmen people is tall, with a male mean of abouit 168 cm.29 Unless these are the skeletons of Hamites or Arabs, we may infer that the megalith builders were not the small Mediterraneans proper of Mesolithic tradition, but a new ethnic element which we shall be able to study more profitably when we find it in greater numbers farther to the north. 25. Bertholon and Chantre, Récherches anthropologiques dans la Berbérie Orientale, pp. 237-242. 26. Ibid., pp. 240-242. 27. Boule, M., Verneau, R., Vallois, H., AIPH, Mem. 13, p. 190. 28. There are very few in Morocco, and nothing is known of their skeletal contents. 29. Bertholon and Chantre, op. cit., pp. 243-249. |