174 Annals of the South African Museum. 



woman (1 m. 54 cm.); the other of an adolescent from fifteen to 

 seventeen years of age, and both are in the tucked position. A 

 flat stone supported by another at each end protected one of the 

 heads only. A very shallow hole had been dug for the bodies. The 

 young man had a tiara consisting of four rows of the small shell 

 {Nassa neritcea), and the old woman bore on the left arm two arm- 

 lets made of the same kind of shell. A few flint flakes seemed to 

 have been deposited on, or placed alongside, the bodies. 



Boule, who has made a special palaeontological study of the cave, 

 states that these skeletons belong to a very remote part of the 

 pleistocene.* 



The importance of this discovery is perhaps no less great than 

 that of the Chapelle aux Saints, quoted in Chapter II. The 

 identity of this small, Negroid race that seems to have preceded the 

 Cro-Magnon, and is itself posterior to the Neanderthal, rests, it is 

 true, on two skeletons only ; but so did at one tmie the evidence 

 of the Neanderthal-Spy, which several ultimate finds are now 

 corroborating.! 



In our sepultures, however, there is nothing to indicate an age as 

 old as that attributed to the Grimaldi remains by such an experi- 

 enced man as Boule ; but we have the same rite of burial, the same 

 ornaments, the same position of the body, and the negroid character. 

 It is therefore not rash to say that if these Hottentot-Bushmen, 

 which I denominate Strand Loopers, are the survivors of any race, 

 it is with that of Grimaldi that we shall find similarity. 



* The bones and also the ornaments were so cemented with the layer that it was 

 necessary to use chisel and hammer to detach them. Yerneau was compelled to 

 break the skulls, which had become so compressed laterally that their transverse 

 diameter could not be ascertained, and to restore them afterwards to their primitive 

 shape. 



f Herve and Pittard respectively claim, subsequently to the discovery of the 

 Grimaldi type, to have found characters pertaining to this race in two neolithic 

 skulls from Brittany (two women the dentition of which is singularly like that 

 mentioned byGaudryas belonging to the Grimaldi fossil man), and two skulls from 

 the Valais Mountains in Switzerland. 



