240 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 83 



knives and scrapers, Mousterian affinities. But the long and other 

 fine points, including the remarkable double-point, the drills, and 

 other objects, suggest more advanced development. There is certainly 

 nothing very primitive about the culture, though a few of the worked 

 stones are rather crude or simple. 



Similarly with the human skeletal remains — they are certainly not 

 more primitive than those of the Neanderthalers. They are on the 

 whole less primitive, in fact, than the Neanderthal remains proper, 

 or the La Chapelle, or Le Moustier, or the adult Gibraltar, The 

 lower jaws come close to most of those of Krapina, and so do the 

 two upper incisors as well as other teeth. The fauna also resembles 

 in the main that of Krapina. The Krapina industry, in the main 

 Mousterian, is also somewhat aberrant, though whether these aberra- 

 tions are near those of Ehringsdorf is uncertain ; both may be quite 

 local and differing from each other. 



The presence of Rhinoceros merckii both at Ehringsdorf and 

 Krapina is neither proof of contemporaneity of the two sites, nor 

 that either of them is of greater antiquity than the French and Belgian 

 Mousterian sites where this form has not been encountered. The 

 presence of the remains of R. tichorkimis at a lower horizon, as 

 reported by Soergel,* shows that the older form {R. merckii) sur- 

 vived for some time at least after the coming or development of the 

 newer. 



The assumption of the German writers that the Ehringsdorf man, 

 or at least he of the older strata, lived well into, if not throughout, 

 the third (Riss-Wiirm) interglacial, and a similar assumption about 

 the Krapina man, while the other Neanderthal remains are usually 

 believed to straddle, chronologically, the last or Wiirm glaciation, 

 seems incongruous and involves chronological, faunal, cultural, as 

 well as somatological difficulties. The question arises whether the 

 Ehringsdorf stratum could not be attributed to a warmer intermedi- 

 ary period of the last glaciation itself, rather than to the preceding, 

 supposedly long, interglacial period. The cultural and somatological 

 evidence, at least, would seem to favor this conception. We strike 

 here the well-known difficulty of harmonizing the Mousterian time, 

 and especially its beginnings, with the current and especially the 

 German geological-paleontological deductions as to the periods follow- 



' See Wiegers, in Der Schadelfund von Weimar-Ehringsdorf, p. 9, last par., 



