Welsh Neandertals

THE WELSH NEANDERTHALS amanDa reeS sets off into the great Celtic desert in search of ancient racial survivals, mysterious megaliths, fairy folklore and one of the oddest byways of evolutionary science... t was a dark October night towards The Triumph of The the end of the last century, when an TeuTonic race? Oxford professor stepped into a quiet For many people, then as now, if there mid-Wales pub in search of ale and was one thing that they ‘knew’ about the blood. Bryan Sykes was on a quest for early history of Britain, it was that the genetic samples that would help him original inhabitants of the islands had been Imap the biological origins of the peoples of conquered by an incoming race that was the British Isles. He wanted blood donors physically very different from the indigenes. to supply him with the mitochondrial In the popular mind, this usually meant DNA and Y chromosomes that he could the post-Roman invasion of the tall, fair use to track the prehistoric migrations of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, a Teutonic wave early Britons – but he got more than he’d that swept across the islands, dominating, bargained for when a local drinker, hearing decimating and deporting the original him enthusiastically describing his project short and dark ‘Britons’. Antiquarians to the people at the bar, beckoned him over had excavated barrows and mounds, and told him the strange tale of the twins of and had seen that some contained ‘long’ Tregaron. 1 In their cottage, high in the hills skulls, while others held the remains of behind the ruined Cistercian monastery ‘broad-headed’ people. This categorisation of Ystrad Fflur (Strata Florida), had lived was based on the cranial (cephalic) these bachelor farmers – who also just index – the maximum width of the skull happened to be Neanderthals. was multiplied by 100 and divided by its It seemed that during the 1950s and 60s, maximum length to arrive at a ratio where these brothers would annually host the local everything under a measurement of 75.9 schoolchildren for an afternoon treat of fizzy was called ‘dolichocephalic’ (long-headed) pop and cakes, while the teacher used them and everything over 81.1, brachycephalic as living (pre)history exhibits in a lecture (broad). Dolichocephalic folk seemed to on evolution and human origins. Now, as in the cottage lived be found at sites that were older and more Sykes himself acknowledged, the existence remote than those of the broad-heads, of a relict Neanderthal population, even in these bachelor apparently representing physical evidence the wilds of West Wales, seemed inherently that one population had indeed been unlikely – so was this just a tale invented by farmers who just replaced by another in the murky pre- and the locals to tease the visiting Englishman? post- Roman years. Or was there something more to this story happened to be However, by the late 19th century, it of prehistoric peoples still living in the was becoming plain that the history of sparsely populated ‘Green Desert’ of mid- neanderthals humanity long pre-dated Rome. In the Wales? 2 river beds and caves of France, stone The answers to these questions lie in the tools were being found alongside the history of race science, anthropology and University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. bones of extinct mammals; and in 1859, prehistory in Britain during the first half of Over the course of his long life and career John Evans and Arthur Prestwich, men the 20th century. The science of craniometry, (1877-1969), Fleure was anxious, as his of considerable scholarly repute, assured evolutionary theory and scientific fashion obituary recorded “to make all available British scientists that these tools were proof combine with the origin myths of Britain, knowledge tributary to an elucidation of that humanity had a pre-history: man had the ‘real’ fairies of folklore and the men man’s physical and cultural origins” 3 – been contemporary with mammoth. 4 The who built the megaliths in the work of one and his discovery of a very ancient strain Herbert John Fleure, Gregynog Professor of people in the hills of mid-Wales was a ABOVE: Professor Herbert John Fleure. of Anthropology and Geography at the essential part of that endeavour. FACING PAGE: A photo of Fleure’s ‘Plynlymon type’. 40 FT337 www.forteantimes.com THE WELSH NEANDERTHALS abiding question was what that man had promises, for the truth… they are always looked like, and, crucially, what relationship ready for perjury”. 6 This rather bitter he bore to the current inhabitants of Britain. description may be explained by the fact By the 1870s, scholars such as William Boyd that the Welsh National Eisteddfod Council Dawkins, the original excavator of Wookey had, some years earlier, ‘welshed’ on their Hole, were arguing that these patterns of promise to pay Beddoe 150 guineas in prize Stone Age burials did in fact reflect the money. 7 Even so, Beddoe acknowledged that modern distribution of British races: the other aspects of that nation’s psychological skulls of a tall, broad-headed race were make-up were less unappealing. They were, found everywhere in Britain and Ireland for example, passionate about genealogies, that was worth conquering, while those of a a characteristic that was to make them very short, long-headed people were confined to useful to other investigators of the evolution the remnants and far edges of the islands. 5 and origins of the British peoples – such as For the late Victorians, these findings were Herbert John Fleure. really rather satisfactory. They confirmed that the ultimate ancestors of the English race “concenTraTeD essenceS of had used their technological, physical and localiTy” cultural superiority to banish the ancestors Fleure was intent on developing a new, more of the Celtic nations to the fringes – an objective, way of studying race evolution in early imperial triumph that the soldiers and Britain, one that tied history to geography, administrators of Victoria’s empire were then and drew on folklore and local knowledge bent on recreating on a global scale. physical appearance, such as eye and hair as much as it did on callipers and statistics. At the same time, John Beddoe, a colour, cephalic index, degree of chin or brow A Channel Islander by birth, who had spent doctor and amateur anthropologist, was protuberance and so on. He argued that both much of his childhood as a near-invalid, he concentrating on analysing the physical the corporeal and mental characteristics was offered a job at the University of Wales characteristics of the current population of the different British races persisted (Aberystwyth) in 1904. Employed initially as in an effort to map the distribution of the coherently over time, supporting this claim by an assistant lecturer in zoology, geology and Saxon, Danish, Celtic or Frankish types – reference to the early chroniclers. He pointed botany, he accepted only on condition that the intellectual ancestor of Bryan Sykes’s out that Gerald of Wales, for example, had he was also allowed to pursue his interests 20th century genetic survey. In the absence agreed with him that the Welsh possessed in anthropology and geography. 8 This of any knowledge of DNA or blood groups, swarthy complexions, were bold in speech interdisciplinary orientation grew out of his however, Beddoe based his classifications on and had “no respect for their oaths, for the deep interest in evolution and his passionate es ag y Im TT os / Ge T o PH ox ox F TOP: John Beddoe. ABOVE: The ruined door of strata Florida Abbey; the Tregaron ‘neanderthal’ twins supposedly lived in a cottage in the hills above the site. 42 FT337 www.forteantimes.com DiScovering ‘plynlymon man’ So what did he do? Like Sykes at the end of the century, he travelled around Wales, seeking volunteers to participate in his physiognomic mapping of the nation. Between 1905 and 1958, with pauses for two world wars, he and his co-workers measured almost anyone and everyone who would stand still for long enough. They preferred “the simple folk, as the more leisured classes of nearly everywhere are of very mixed descent”.13 They avoided foreigners (except in the border areas), those with obvious deformities/ deficiencies, and, by and large, women. They recorded on file cards – now held in the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institution in London – the details of their subjects’ individual characters (height, head shape and cephalic index, zygomatic arch, degree of pigmentation, prominence of chin and so on), and while one measured, the other would note down the subject’s family history, with particular reference to the birthplace of all four grandparents. There was nothing novel about the type of information that Fleure was seeking. But what was unusual were the strategies he used to record and to display his data. In this pre-digital age, without the assistance of computers or spreadsheets, he developed ABOVE: John Beddoe attempted to map the distribution of different racial types – saxon, Danish, Celtic, Frankish a system of notation that meant that an and so on – among the current population of Britain by using physical characteristics. individual subject’s unique composition of characteristics could be recorded typographically on a map. Particular symbols belief that the physical and mental heritage ‘typical’ characteristics of that race. In were held to represent specific shapes of skull of humankind had to be investigated as it this way, they were in serious danger of and pigmentation, so that a combination of emerged out of interaction with a complex themselves creating the object that they’d these symbols marked in a given place on the and changing natural, social and cultural set out to study.

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