THE PROGRESSION OF LIFE ON EARTH 



skull of an Australian native found in a river deposit at 

 Talgai, in Queensland. 



Another fossil human jaw, found in a sand pit at Mauer, 

 near Heidelberg, Germany, is ape-like in the downv^ard and 

 backward slope of the bony chin. In other respects, however, 

 it is typically human, though it is unusually thick and heavy. 

 It is probably almost or quite as old as the Piltdown jaw, 

 just mentioned. At the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, 

 therefore, there existed in Europe more than one race of 

 men that resembled apes in the peculiarities of their jaws. 



Later deposits in Germany, Belgium, and France — even 

 some so far away as Palestine — have yielded remains of men 

 with a large brain case and typically human jaws, but with 

 the bony forehead inflated into great brow ridges like those 

 of a chimpanzee. These early men are known by almost 

 complete skeletons, because they had learned to bury their 

 dead, and several of their burial places in caves and rock- 

 shelters have been discovered. They represent the Neander- 

 thal or Mousterian man, so called because the first skeleton 

 to attract attention was found in a cave in the Neanderthal 

 near Diisseldorf and the stone tools which this kind of man 

 made were first studied in the cave of Le Moustier, in the 

 Dordogne. Neanderthal man walked with a shuffling gait, 

 not quite upright, as proved by his gorilla-like neck and thigh 

 bone. Indeed, he combined in one body more ape characters 

 than are seen in any other low kind of Man. 



The cave-floor deposits and others later than those contain- 

 ing Neanderthal man yield no remains of any but typical 

 modern man, Homo sapiens. Some of these remains suggest 

 that the human races of the northern hemisphere were at 

 first less distinctly separated than they are at the present day; 

 but the skeletons found are still too few to warrant definite 

 conclusions. Fossil skulls from Wadjak, in Java, and from 



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