PHYLOGENY 



portionately large. As the Steinheim and Ehringsdorf skulls also show 

 some of these features, some anthropologists regard them as the earliest 

 Neanderthal men. 



Fossils which have sometimes been considered Neanderthalian have 

 also been found in South Africa and in Java. The South African fossils 

 were found in Rhodesia, in 1921, and have been described under the name 

 of Homo rhodesiensis. The find includes a nearly complete skull (Figure 

 70), part of another upper jaw, portions of limb bones and of the pelvic 

 girdle. The limb bones are not distinguishable from those of modern man, 

 but the skull is somewhat Neanderthaloid in appearance. The brain ca- 

 pacity is about 1250 cubic centimeters. Geological evidence on the age 

 of Rhodesian man is inconclusive, but bones of species of mammals now 

 living were found in the same cave, and it seems probable that the fossils 

 are of relatively recent origin. In 1953, a skull cap and jaw fragment were 

 found near Saldanha Bay in South Africa, and were described as Saldanha 

 man. These bones resemble those of Rhodesian man. They appear to be 

 older, and may have been ancestral to Rhodesian man. The Javanese find 

 consists of eleven incomplete skulls and a tibia. The tibia is indistinguish- 

 able from that of modern man, but the skulls ( all lacking the facial skele- 

 ton) are Neanderthaloid. The cranial capacity, however, is small, varying 

 from 1150 to 1300 cubic centimeters. As the fossils were found on the 

 Solo river in 1931 and 1932, they have been described under the name 

 Homo soloensis. Both the Rhodesian and Solo men have been considered 

 as late Neanderthal survivors, but perhaps more anthropologists now re- 

 gard them as of uncertain relationship to other men. 



The problem of the relationship of Neanderthal man to modern man is 

 a much vexed question. It was originally assumed that the relationship 

 was one of direct descent from Neanderthal to modern man. But the dis- 

 covery of the Swanscombe skull in 1935 showed that a much more modern 

 type of man was already present in Europe long before the date of the 

 earliest known Neanderthal remains. Further, Neanderthal man was at 

 least partly contemporaneous with Cro-Magnon man (see below), and 

 this would appear to disqualify the Neanderthal as an ancestor, for it is 

 generally agreed that Cro-Magnon man was ancestral to modern man. 

 Some anthropologists now favor the idea that Neanderthal man is, like 

 modern man, descended from Pithecanthropus, but by a collateral line 

 which died out without leaving any descendants. Thus the relationship 

 of Neanderthal man to modern man is that of an uncle rather than that of 

 a parent. But so distinguished an anthropologist as Weidenreich, in re- 

 viewing the extensive fossils of Neanderthal and modern man, as well as 

 many intermediates at Mount Carmel in Syria, has concluded that "No 

 matter how the occurrence of such a mixture of forms may be explained, 

 this find proves that the Neanderthalians did not die out but sm'vived 

 somewhere by continuing in Homo sapiens." * The classical Neanderthal 

 remains were all found in western Europe and were of rather late date. 

 However, many skeletons of earlier date and of less marked Neanderthal- 



* From Weidenreich, "Apes, Giants, and Man," 1946, University of Chicago Press. 



194 



