In early Metal Age times influences from the Aegean spread westward to Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, and Spain, reaching also the smaller islands of the western Mediterranean. This maritime diffusion was probably carried by seafarers in search of new sources of metal as well as markets for their products, and the traders and adventurers followed the old Megalithic routes. In the beginning the bringers of metal and the Late Megalithic colonists may well have been the same people.The evidence of the racial composition of the Copper Age sailors who reached Italy and the Italian islands is simple and direct. The moderately tall, long-headed, mid narrow-nosed Megalithic people who were implanted, during the Late Neolithic, upon the smaller Mediterranean type which had preceded them, were followed, during the Aeneolithic by other, of the same kind, in the company of equally tall brachycephals. The latter resembled the people of the same Dinaric head form in Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean, and without doubt formed a westward extension of the same movement.
In Sicily, which probably received metal earlier than most of the mainland or the islands farther west, Copper Age skulls of one series from Isnello are all of general Mediterranean type, with the Megalithic variety predominant, as shown by excessive skull lengths, moderate vault heights, and narrow noses. The mean stature for twenty-four males, presumably of this type, was 169 cm. Other Sicilian series, however, do include brachycephals, as at Chiusella and Villafratti, with cranial indices ranging as high as 91. These form, however, no more than one-third of the total Aeneolithic series from Sicily. In the true Bronze Age which followed, the incidence of these brachycephals increased.
In Sardinia a large series of sixty-three Copper Age skulls from Anghelu Ruju includes sixteen per cent, or ten individuals, of the new brachycephalic type, while the others resemble the long heads of Sicily. The group as a whole, irrespective of head form, was tall. The racial composition of Corsica during these periods is known only through the presence of one small, short-statured, long-headed female skeleton of either Neolithic or Aeneolithic age, and two brachycephalic crania from the Bronze Age. It would be interesting to supplement this survey of the Italian islands with a study of the crania found in the elaborate burial chambers of Malta, of late Neolithic or early Metal Age date, but the excavators of these vaults, professional and otherwise, literally threw away what was probably the longest unified series of human crania ever found, numbering over seven thousand. We are told that these early Maltese were "Mediterraneans," and know little else about them.
On the mainland of Italy, Aeneolithic skeletons, which are found mostly on the western side of the central portion of the peninsula, belong to the same types found on the islands, but brachycephals are more abundant, being equal in number to the dolicho and mesocephals. Some of the Aeneolithic Italians of the Campagna and of Latium were very tall and large headed, with both mesocephalic and brachycephalic fortes. In Istria, at the head of the Adriatic, the Dinaric population which is dominant in that peninsula today had begun to arrive in the Copper and Bronze Ages, judging by a series of six female crania which bear definite indications of this type, such as flattening of the occiput, narrow face, and projecting nasal bones. The new invaders may, therefore, have travelled up the Adriatic as well as over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Reviewing the Italian material, on both metrical and morphological grounds we may determine that the round-headed racial type which came into the middle Mediterranean with the introduction of metal was of a general Dinaric character, and without doubt came from Asia Minor and the Aegean, where it first appeared in the last centuries of the third millennium B.C. Since the metal ages of the middle and western Mediterranean were later than those farther east, the chronological aspect of this theory presents no contradictions.