240 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



the later part of the Lower Paleolithic. In the Tabun cave was found a 

 Neanderthal-like woman with some sapiens characteristics, while the skull 

 cave contained several skeletons of a practically sapiens type but with 

 Neanderthal-like features. The interpretation of all this is likewise in doubt. 

 The discoverers believe that they have found what is perhaps the actual 

 moment of appearance of Homo sapiens, while others think the skeletons 

 represent a mixture of the two species, in which case Homo sapiens must 

 already have been in existence, and probably for some time. 



This is not much with which to reconstruct the trail of Homo sapiens 

 into the past after the visible part of it disappears abruptly with the Cro 

 Magnons, or at best becomes pocketed in the mysterious case of the Mount 

 Carmel skeletons. Even if we provisionally accept the Swanscombe skull 

 as a specimen of Ho?no sapiens, there remains a large gap in time between 

 it and the Cro Magnons, bridged only by a moral certainty. Consequently 

 there is a flourishing diversity of opinion in the whole matter — notice that 

 even regarding the Mount Carmel skeletons alone there are currently two 

 quite different explanations, logically leading to equally different con- 

 clusions as to the age of our species. In general there are two schools of 

 thought. One holds that the development of Hoino sapiens was inde- 

 pendent of that of other species, all of them being considered as a con- 

 stellation of different descendants of a common source placed well back in 

 Tertiary time. At the other extreme are those who would graft him onto 

 some one of the known non-sapiefis forms of man, at some period well 

 along in the Pleistocene. 



Neanderthal Man supplies a case in point. Becoming extinct less than 

 50 millenniums ago, he seems to have ruled Europe for the preceding 100 

 millenniums at least. A few students think that during his career he gave 

 rise to, or influenced, Homo sapiens. Others feel that this is not so; that his 

 physical unlikeness, in his low, massive head and huge face, is too great, 

 and that he had developed definite pecuHarities of his own which are not 

 to be found in modern man and which would therefore exclude him from 

 our ancestry. In spite of all the racial variety of the latter, and a consider- 

 able variety of the Neanderthal species as well, there is no actual over- 

 lapping of the two stocks in physical form. 



Now if there has not been any important connection between the two 

 species in recent times, then it would appear that Homo sapiens existed 

 somewhere outside of Europe, and that his line goes back, parallel to but 

 not connected with that of the Neanderthals, for many thousand years. 

 Does it go back to the Java and Pekin types, or is the same situation re- 

 peated here? Probably it is. The Swanscombe skull shows, if it shows 

 nothing else, that a high, vaulted brain case of the sa^piens type, whether 

 actually parental to that of our species or not, had been evolved in the 

 human family long before the known period of the Neanderthals, and 

 almost certainly as early as, or earlier than, the backward Java-Pekin 



