56 THE RISE OF MAN. 



erectus, but Hermann Klaatsch and his colleagues have 

 pointed out that the typically human bone is exactly dis- 

 tinguished by a slight curve, and so it appears that the 

 straightness of the bone has nothing to do with man's 

 erect carriage. Hence it is not impossible that Du Bois's 

 pilhecus anthropits erectus may have been nearer in his 

 walk to the Simians than his discoverer assumes. 



The broadness of the tooth and the expanded charac- 

 ter of its roots indicate that the jawbone must have pos- 

 sessed sufficient space for molar teeth, and thus favor the 

 assumption that the mouth of its mainly herbivorous 

 owner was more Simian than human. 



While the breadth and length of the Javan ape-man's 

 skull are not inconsiderable, its height is extraordinarily 

 low, and the processes at its rear for the attachment of the 

 muscles of the back plainly prove that the owner of this 

 interesting relic possessed a very short stout neck not 

 unlike that of the anthropoid apes. 



In addition to these characteristic traits the skull of 

 Du Bois's man exhibits the same orbital ridges as the skull 

 of the Neanderthal man, a feature also noticed in the fossils 

 of the Spy and Krapina caves. All other skulls of primi- 

 tive men that have so far ever been discovered, especially 

 the skulls of the Cro-Magnon cave in the valley of Vezere 

 (France) , are of a higher type and represent a nearer 

 approach to the human, both by an absence of the orbital 

 ridges and by a considerably increased height and brain- 

 capacity. 



There are enough traces of the ape-man to establish 

 his whilom existence beyond a shadow of doubt, but theer 

 are not enough facts to give us any further information 

 about details. No one knows how many centuries or 

 millenniums it took to develop the species pithecanthropus 

 into primitive man, and why the former became extinct 

 with the appearance of the latter is a subject of surmise, 

 not of positive knowledge. 



