Abstract
IT is generally considered more or less a fixed point in discussion of the racial history of the British Isles that a fundamental element in the population, which appears at least as early as the long barrow, is of Mediterranean origin. It will, therefore, come as a surprise to many to find that arguments subversive of this view have been put forward recently by Dr. G. B. Morant (J. Roy. Anthrop. lust., 66, Pt. 1) in an analysis of the material upon which Dr. Cecil P. Martin based his study of the racial composition of the Irish people in “Prehistoric Man in Ireland” (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1935). Dr. Martin's conclusions pointed to a virtual identity of racial history in Ireland and Britain up to the intrusion of the Romans and Saxons in Britain. Ireland, however, on the whole was said to have a larger Iberian element and a smaller Nordic element than Britain. Dr. Morant, after a statistical analysis of the modern Irish material, has arrived at the conclusion that the modern Irish and the British Iron Age population are so similar that they might be samples from the same material, while the latter bear the same relation to the population of the White-chapel plague pit of the seventeenth century. The Anglo-Saxon is slightly removed; but the modern English and the modern Irish might well be considered variants of one race.
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Races in the British Isles. Nature 139, 143–144 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139143c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139143c0