Abstract
ILLEGITIMACY AND RACIAL INVASIONS IN BRITAIN.—Dr. John Brownlee has published in Man for October an interesting note on the distribution of frequency in illegitimacy in the north of England and Scotland, and its relation to and bearing upon the evidence for racial migration. In the north of England there is a sufficiently close correspondence between the distribution of the round barrow and that of illegitimacy to suggest that this custom was introduced at the beginning of the Bronze Age, and that the invasion of Angles was not sufficient to do more than introduce a new racial element into this part of the country without modifying the custom. Information on illegitimacy in Scotland has been studied in more detail. The range of variation is much greater, the highest percentage of illegitimacy occurring in Aberdeenshire and in the southern districts of Scotland, especially Dumfries and Galloway. The Aberdeen-shire district contains a larger proportion of broad-headed persons than any other part of Scotland; but the broad-headed population of the Aberdeenshire tombs is more closely allied to the type of central Europe than is that of Yorkshire and southern England. The percentage of illegitimate to legitimate births is 12 to 15, a rate comparable with that of central Europe. In Dumfries and Galloway there is no broad-headed association, the population being the most narrow-headed in Scotland; but here a close association with a certain type of hill-fort appears. This type of fort belongs to some period about the beginning of the Christian era. In the Norse settlements, Orkney, Shetland, and the western islands, the illegitimacy rate is low, but there are pockets in the north, chiefly adjacent to the coast, where the rate is high.
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Research Items. Nature 118, 746–748 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118746a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118746a0