The Modern Londoner and Long Barrow Man

Abstract

AT a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute held on March 8, Prof. F. G. Parsons read a paper on “The Modern Londoner and Long Barrow Man,” in which he discussed a claim made by Dr. Macdonell and Prof. Karl Pearson that the head shape of Londoners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more like that of the Long Barrow men than of any other race. Prof. Parsons, however, showed, by a detailed comparison of contours obtained from thirty male London skulls of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dug up in the Clare Market district, and corresponding with the averages obtained by Dr. Macdonell from his London skulls found at Whitechapel and Moorfields, with those of twenty Long Barrow skulls from Yorkshire, Wiltshire, ani Gloucestershire, that in the head measurements, in the depth of the orbital openings, in the length of the face, and in other anatomical details the London skulls differed markedly from those of the Long Barrow men. On the other hand, in every respect these London skulls corresponded more closely with those of Anglo-Saxons than with those of Long Barrow men. Occasionally a Londoner might reproduce the Long Barrow type, as in the case of the notorious thief Jonathan Wild, but these cases were so rare as not to affect the average contour.