(Photographic Supplement, Plate 10)


Upper Palaeolithic Survivals in Morocco


During the Late Pleistocene North Africa was inhabited by the Afalou men, a race of tall, large-headed, heavy-boned, people with exaggeratedly rugged cranial and facial features comparable to those of the Crô-Magnon-Brünn group in Europe. This Afalou race bore with it a tendency to brachycephaly. In post-glacial time North Africa has been a highroad of invasion, from the eastern Mediterranean to Europe, and the survivors of those Afalou people who remained are to be found mostly in two refuge areas, the Moroccan Rif and the Canary Islands. Here only the Riffian group will be depicted. In the Rif, besides more numerous Mediterraneans, Nordics, and mixed types, the Afalou strain has survived or reëmerged in recognizable form, and may be seen to have gone through an evolution parallel to that of European Upper Palaeolithic survivors in Ireland and on the continent of Europe. As in Europe, these survivors are often blond; as in Ireland, frequently rufous.

FIG. 1 (2 views). A sheikh of Targuist. Blond, metrically comparable to the Nordics, as in the case of the Irishman in FIG. 4 of the preceding plate, but in the same sense un-Nordic in facial features; probably Nordic mixture is partly responsible.

FIG. 2 (2 views). A larger-headed, mesocephalic example of the same type, comparable in features to Northwest Europeans with Borreby blood; like the first example and wholly unlike the Nordic and Mediterranean strains in the Rif, this individual is lateral in constitutional type; heavy boned, and heavily muscled. This man is a fkih (schoolmaster and leader of the mosque) in the Riffian tribe of Bern Ulishk.

FIG. 3 (2 views). The kaid or governor of the tribe of Targuist. For some unknown reason Riffians who hold public office usually belong to this physical type. The kaid is rufous, and like many Riffians, could pass for an Irishman if differently clothed and coiffured.

FIG. 4 (2 views). A very blond youth from the Senhajan tribe of Ktama, the most isolated spot in northern Morocco. Facially he resembles a southern Swede; closely similar individuals have been observed in the Canary Islands. The dimensions of his head are small, however; he must be regarded as a mesocephalic, cranially reduced type similar to the Irishman on plate 9, Fig. 6.

FIG. 5 (2 views). A highland Beni Urriaghel Riffian; short-statured, laterally built, rufous; with a snub nose and short face; a reduced mesocephalic Afalou type.

FIG. 6 (1 view). A kaid of Taghzuth, a small tribe of Senhajan craftsmen located in the high mountain forest immediately west of the Rif. Rufous and exaggeratedly "Irish" in facial features.

FIG.7 (1 view). An old Riffian warrior, one of the Ulad Abd el Mumen clan in the Vale of Iherrushen, Gzennaya. Although indistinguishable metrically from many tall Mediterraneans, this individual possesses morphological features in the region of the eyes, nose, mouth, and jaw, which are clearly of Afalou inspiration, and which give him an "Irish" look.