ioo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In dealing with this question we have to remember in the first 

 place that the number of quite undoubted palaeolithic human bones of 

 the earliest period is all but absolutely nil j and that even the few 

 dubious and suspected bodily remains which we possess, presumably 

 of that age, are for the most part mere broken fragments. Most of 

 our palaeolithic bones belong to the latest cave age, and represent a 

 comparatively high race of savages, known as the Cro-Magnon men. 

 Of their earlier predecessors we know but little. We have, however, 

 two remarkable portions of skulls, one of which is almost free from 

 suspicion, while the other, though more doubtful, is still accepted as 

 genuine by good Continental anthropologists. Both apparently belong 

 to the earliest age of the cave-men. The first is the celebrated jaw of 

 La Naulette. This is a massive and prognathous bone, with enormous 

 and projecting canine teeth ; and these canine teeth, as Mr. Darwin 

 notes, point back very clearly to a nearly anthropoid progenitor.* The 

 second is the much-debated Neanderthal skull, which possesses large 

 bosses on the forehead, strikingly suggestive of those which give the 

 gorilla its peculiarly fierce appearance. So good an anatomist as Pro- 

 fessor Rolleston assures us that, if these frontal sinuses had been 

 found without the skull to which they are attached, he would have 

 been a bold man indeed who would venture to pronounce them human. 

 The thickness of the bones in the rest of the Neanderthal skeleton, to 

 which Professor Schaaf hausen calls attention, also approximates to the 

 anthropoid pattern. " No other human skull," says that able anthro- 

 pologist, " presents so utterly bestial a type as the Neanderthal frag- 

 ment. If one cuts a female gorilla skull in the same fashion, the 

 resemblance is truly astonishing, and we may say that the only human 

 feature in this skull is its size." All the skulls of what De Quatre- 

 fages and Hamy call the " Canstadt race " show these same low char- 

 acteristics, and " must have presented a strangely savage aspect." 

 The other supposed relics of the earlier cave-men are either too slight, 

 too much crushed, or too uncertain, to be of much use for purposes of 

 argument. When we add that even the later cave-man was almost 

 certainly hairy, like the modern Ainos, we have before us the picture 

 of what may fairly be considered a sort of missing link, though only 

 the last in a long chain. 



Moreover, it is a most deceptive practice to speak of the cave-men 

 as if they were a single set of people, representing a merely temporary 

 type. As a matter of fact, the period covered by the cave remains is 

 enormously long, and the men of one epoch must have differed widely 

 from those of another. M. de Mortillet has actually distinguished 

 three subdivisions of the cave period, marked by a successive improve- 



* Since this article was sent to press, Professor Maska, of Neutitschein, has discovered 

 a human jaw-bone, associated with pleistocene mammalian remains, in the Schipka cave 

 (Moravia). This bone, which belonged to a very young child (as inferred from the devel- 

 opment of the teeth), " is of very large, indeed, of colossal dimensions." 



