Who Built the Aberdeen Stone Circles?

Abstract

IN an article in NATURE of April 9 dealing with the orientation of the Aberdeen stone circles, Sir Norman Lockyer says:—“Another of the associated inquiries will be to see if the area of the recumbent stone has also special ethnological or craniological characteristics”. It may be of interest, in this connection, to point out that the short cist skeletons in the anatomical museum of Aberdeen University have been derived from an area coinciding very closely with that of the Aberdeen stone circles. These skeletons have been recently measured by Dr. Low (see Proceedings of the Anatomical and Anthropological Society, University of Aberdeen, 1902–6), and the measurements, as I showed in a paper read before the British Association at York, reveal the existence, in the early Bronze age, in this district, of a race significantly different from all the prehistoric racial types previously determined in Britain. This race is hyperbrachycephalic, having an average cephalic index of 85, and it is of short stature, 5 feet 3 inches. It differs from the Neolithic race, which was markedly dolichocephalic, and it also differs from the Bronze age race of the round tumuli, whose index was 78 and stature 5 feet 9 inches.