contention that the flow of Arabian migrations was northwards towards
Syria ere it swept through Mesopotamia. It can scarcely be supposed
that these invasions of settled districts did not result in the fusion
and crossment of racial types and the production of a sub-variety with
medium skull form and marked facial characteristics.

Of special interest in this connection is the evidence afforded by
Palestine and Egypt. The former country has ever been subject to
periodic ethnic disturbances and changes. Its racial history has a
remote beginning in the Pleistocene Age. Palaeolithic flints of
Chellean and other primitive types have been found in large numbers,
and a valuable collection of these is being preserved in a French
museum at Jerusalem. In a northern cave fragments of rude pottery,
belonging to an early period in the Late Stone Age, have been
discovered in association with the bones of the woolly rhinoceros. To
a later period belong the series of Gezer cave dwellings, which,
according to Professor Macalister, the well-known Palestinian
authority, "were occupied by a non-Semitic people of low stature, with
thick skulls and showing evidence of the great muscular strength that
is essential to savage life".[20] These people are generally supposed
to be representatives of the Mediterranean race, which Sergi has found
to have been widely distributed throughout Syria and a part of Asia
Minor.[21] An interesting problem, however, is raised by the fact
that, in one of the caves, there are evidences that the dead were
cremated. This was not a Mediterranean custom, nor does it appear to
have prevailed outside the Gezer area. If, however, it does not
indicate that the kinsmen of the Ancient Egyptians came into contact
with the remnants of an earlier people, it may be that the dead of a
later people were burned there. The possibility that unidentified
types may have contributed to the Semitic blend, however, remains. The