The new science of genetic genealogy has only confirmed what has been long inferred about the early peopling of the British Isles some 8,000 years ago by 'Iberian' settlers from the Basque / Catalonian 'refugia' that sheltered them from the last Ice Age south of the Pyrenees. As McKay writes in 1888 about the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire:
"At the present day, since the investigations of Darwin, Galton, Spencer, and others have shown us the paramount importance of the hereditary element in determining character and intelligence, few abstract questions can possess greater natural interest for any well-defined locality than the question of what original stocks it is a compound or loose agglomeration. We know now that racial characteristics persist for long periods of time unaltered.
Mr. Darwin has shown that even abnormalities, such as an extra toe or finger, and the power of contracting the skin of the head, remain as heirlooms for considerable periods of time in particular families. Still more do racial peculiarities persist in the body of every great group, and survive all mere results of social accidents, such as language, law, and the sense of national distinctness or unity.
One tribe of people may conquer the members of another, impose upon them their own tongue, manners, and name, and live together with them till all memory of the original diversity is lost; but the small bodily characteristics of race will still be perpetuated in the two groups, probably assuming the guise of distinctly aristocratic and plebian features, and the ethnologist will be able to recognise, by the shape of the skull, the colour of the hair and eyes, the stature, the build, the length of bone, and so forth, the particular race to which each person in the resulting compound nation mainly belongs.
Sitting on the terrace of Pendle Hill, there is a peculiar fascination in taking up, at the instance of Mr. Dawkins, the history of our race on that shadowy border land where geology aids and chronicles have not yet begun; and where, in the absence of written records, the historian is left to deductions framed on the presence or absence of the more or less rude works of early man.
In an enchanting work of his, Professor Boyd Dawkins arrays from every available source all that is known of the earliest race on which Pendle Hill can have ever looked, and carefully collates and analyses the facts touching the physical condition of this island in each of these far off epochs, and describes with accuracy the traces of human workmanship as they appear, and states what, in his experienced judgment, these remains indicate.
Professor Boyd Dawkins, who stands in the foremost rank of living authorities on the special branch of knowledge with which we are just now concerned, tells us that when we come to analyse the elements summed up in "Celtic" as the designation of a race, we find that the aboriginal inhabitants of this island consisted of a human stream half Celtic and half Iberian, and that the latter was the oldest stock of the two. He has pictured for us, with the genius of a gifted master, what manner of people these Celts and Iberians who haunted our hill-tops in prehistoric times were - how they lived and fought and died, and the kind of civilisation they possessed.
From the remains found in various caves the Professor is able to say without doubt that these prehistoric Britons were short in stature, the average height being about five feet four inches, with long beards and delicate features, and large foreheads. They have their modern counterpart, so far at least as physique goes, in the population of the northern parts of Spain and the southern parts of France.
We have not the slightest means of saying when this Iberian migration into our island home took place, but it was for certain far outside the utmost bounds of history. And yet, although it is so very long since all this happened, there are still to be seen in some of the dark flashing eyes we admire so much, and in some of those raven locks which also enthral us, reminiscences of the faces of our Iberian forefathers, the cave dwellers of Craven.
McKay, James, 1888, Pendle Hill in History and Literature: Preston, Lancashire, England, Henry Davies & Co., 538 p
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