NEANDERTHAL PHASE OF MAN HRDLlfilvA 617 



accumulate and are better understood, the more it is sensed that the 

 whole Neanderthal question is in need of a revision. 



If the given assumptions are true, then we are confronted by some 

 strange major phenomena, viz, a long double line of human evolution, 

 either in near-by or the same territories; a sudden extinction of one 

 of the lines; and evolutionary sluggishness or pause in the other. 

 The consideration of these hypotheses brings us into a maze of 

 difficulties and contradictions. 



They lead to an outright pol3^geny — which is undemonstrable and 

 improbable; or they concede the evolution of H. sapiens from the 

 same old stock that gave also H. neanderthal ensis, but deny the possi- 

 bility of such evolution from Neanderthal man later on; they give 

 us H. sapiens, without showing why, or how, and where he developed 

 his superior make-up, and imply that, while he evidently developed 

 much more rapidly at first to reach the status of H. sapiens, he then 

 slackened greatly to remain, from the beginning of the postglacial to 

 this day, at nearly the same evolutional level. 



They place H. sapiens in Africa or Asia, without troubling to offer 

 the evidence of his ancient dominion in those regions. Or, if he 

 lived in Europe, coexisting with the Neanderthaler, where are his 

 remains, and why did he not prevail sooner over his inferior cousin? 

 His traces, it will be recalled, never, in Europe or elsewhere, precede 

 or coexist with, but always follow, the Mousterian. And where are 

 there any other examples of a sudden, complete extinction of a whole 

 large group of humanit}" ; or of any wholesale Aurignacian conquest ; 

 or of any superior mentality of the earli/ Aurignacians ? And where 

 are, in fact, in anything like a sufficient number, the undoubted 

 skeletal remains of the early Aurignacians that could be used for 

 comparison? Why did they, a new, superior species, strong and able 

 enough to completely do away with the Neanderthaler, take over the 

 poor Neanderthaler's caves and sites and live in them exactlj^, except 

 for some technical differences in stone chipping, as did their crude 

 predecessors? And how shall we explain the anomalous fact of an 

 invasion during the last ice encroachment, an unfavorable period, 

 when man might be expected to move from, rather than into, such a 

 territory ? 



Valid answers to these and other questions are as yet impossible. 

 There is a need of much further exploration; of much further good 

 fortune in locating additional skeletal remains of all periods, but 

 particularly of the latest Mousterian and earliest Aurignacian; and 

 of a new generation of able workers, well equipped, and unhampered 

 by tradition. 



The indications, for the present, seem however to be the following : 



(1) The Penck-Briickner conception of the Ice Age as composed 

 of four distinct periods of glaciation with three well-marked inter- 



