The Anxient Skeletal Remains of Man 



Hf)\vever interesting^ and scieiitifically valuable the cultural remains 

 of early man may l)c. the actual parts of the human beings of an- 

 tiquity, which show what man was scores and hundreds of thousands 

 of years ago. are immeasurably more so. The cultural remains are 

 the indices of man's gradual mastering of nature, of the slow advance 

 in his mentality, and of the eventual unfolding of his esthetic procliv- 

 ities. r>ut the remains of man himself, though limited to his bones, 

 give us the record of his own amazing differentiation, his evolution. 

 It is insufficient to say that no other range of happenings in nature 

 equals or even approaches in interest and im}X)rtance that of man's 

 ascent ; his evolution can only l>e adequately described as the para- 

 mount phenomenon a'nd achievement of nature. 



Regrettably, the skeletal remains of early man are far more scarce 

 than the cultural. Of worked flints not one perhaps has been com- 

 pletely destroyed unless by fire or through man's own activities; but 

 bones are very perishable, and only rare good fortune as to the con- 

 ditions surrounding them resulted in their preservation. Even then, 

 in a very large majority of cases only some portions of the skull or 

 skeleton escaped destruction, and those that did, have mostly become 

 enclosed in old and now indurated dejxjsits, or even in hard rock, 

 without there being any outward traces of their presence. Thus it is 

 that in general such precious remains are found only by accident, 

 by laborers in excavations or quarrying ; and many have been and 

 doubtless still are being lost through damage or inattention. All this 

 is particularly true of the older remains that would be of most im- 

 portance, and accounts for the scarcity as well as the defects of such 

 discoveries. The object of this treatise will be to give a reliable ac- 

 count of all the more important of these remains based on the original 

 reports, and supplemented by such measurements and data as the 

 writer has personally been able to obtain or corroborate ; the utmost 

 effort being made to present records that may be used with full confi- 

 dence. \\'here plainly justified, critical remarks will be added, with 

 the avoidance, however, of all personal argument. 



Tertiary Man 



The question as to whether man originated first in the Quaternary 

 or existed already in the latter parts of the Tertiary, is still unsettled. 



