Ancient Skulls Uncovered in Maryland and New Jersey Determined to Originate in Northern Germany
These primitive skulls were determined to be of the same origin. The skull on the left was uncovered in Trenton, New Jersey. The skull in the middle was found in Burlington, Maryland and the skull on the right is from Bremen, Germany.
Smithsonian Institute Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin 33 1907
Skeletal Remains Suggesting Or Attributed to Early Man in North America: 1907
Racial Affinities of the Burlington County and Riverview Cemetery Skulls The inevitable conclusions are that the Burlington County skull and that from the Riverview cemetery at Trenton are of a type totally different from that of the Lenape, or of any other Indian crania from the East or elsewhere of which we have thus far any knowledge.
They are skulls of people of a different race with which no further acquaintance has yet been made in this country. What this race was, the writer was not able to show at the time of the publication of the report in 1902. Two possibilities suggested themselves at that time: One, that the crania represented some non-Indian people who preceded the Lenape about Trenton; the other, that they might be crania of later intruders — or immigrants — into that region. The former theory could not be accepted without further proof, and the immigrant idea seemed hardly plausible, for the Delaware Valley had been settled largely by Swedes, whose cranial type is radically different. On the whole, there are very few localities known, in Europe or elsewhere, where normally very low skulls had been observed.
The foregoing accounts, which do not seem to have been followed by any additional observations of importance on similar material, establish the presence in parts of northwestern Germany and Holland in or up to recent times of a cranial type characterized by precisely the feature which renders so extraordinary the skulls from Burlington County and Riverview cemetery, namely, very low height. The cephalic index and the capacity of the European chamaecephals show a wide range, which easily includes the same characteristics of the Trenton specimens. The facial measurements are lacking in the German reports, but Gildemeister speaks of a narrow face, a feature marked also in the two skulls from New Jersey; and one of the latter, it will be remembered, shows a trace of basal depression, such as noticed in a more pronounced degree in some of Virchow's low crania. The illustrations of the European chamaecephals show remarkable general resemblances to the two Trenton skulls — there are the same the rounded outline, without sagittal elevation, of the anterior and the posterior plane, similar shape of the superior plane, and similar aspect of the face. There can be no doubt of the relationship of the two forms, and it now remains to account for the occurrence of identical forms in regions so remote from each other. That such marked similarity of any two normal, important, extreme, and repeated forms in cranial morphology
