The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

156 THE BRONZE AGE AND THE CELTIC WORLD
and these are distributed pretty generally among all indices from sixty-five to
seventy-nine.
Again, Bogdanov has given us reason for believing that two races were inhabiting
the government of Moscow during the kurgan period. " One of these races was
robust, with alarge and long head, an elongated face, and, according to some examples,
with hair more or less fair. The other, smaller and more poverty stricken, belongs to a
brachycephalic people, having a shorter face, a wider and shorter head, and chestnut
hair."' He shows, too, that in the centre of the area the long-headed type was purest,
and cites twenty-three skulls from the kurgans of Souja, in the government of Kursk,
of which nineteen were true dolichocephals, while three women and one child were
subdohchocephalic.
We may, I think, consider the two skulls described by Sergi with an index of
eighty, and the one with an index of eighty-one, as belonging to a foreign element living
on the border of the steppes, perhaps as belonging to the Tripolje folk. If so we may
consider our primitive Nordics as having fairly long and narrow heads, though in this
respect not so uniformly narrow as was the case with the Mediterraneans of the west.
The cephahc index seems to have ranged from sixty-five to seventy-nine, though
more usually from seventy-one to seventy-eight, while the more typical members of
the group varied from seventy-three to seventy-six. These figures will be found to
agree fairly well with observations made on the tall fair people of the present population
of North Europe.
We can then imagine our Wiros as a somewhat variable race, with heads which
conform to the narrow rather than to the broad tjrpe, tall and robust, though probably
neither so tall nor so robust as many of the modern Nordics. There is reason for
believing them to have been fair, with transparent skins, light hair and grey eyes,
though it is hkely enough that in colouration, too, there was considerable variation.
We may well believe that the extremely fair colouring of the modem Swedes is a later
specialisation, due to a few thousand years of Ufe in a northern home, but we shall do
well, I would suggest, to think of the original Wiros as blonds rather than brunets,
though not necessarily or in all cases possessing an extreme degree of blondness.
7 Bogdanov (1892) i.