WHOLE VOL. SKELETAL REMAINS OF EARLY MAN — HRDLICKA 345 



more the material remains of early man accumulate and are better 

 understood, the more it is sensed by the fresh students of the question 

 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 polygeny — 

 which is undemonstrable and improbable ; or they concede the evolu- 

 tion of H. sapiens from the same old stock that gave also H. neander- 

 thalensis, but deny the possibility 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 post-glacial to this day, at nearly the same evolutional level. 



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

 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 humanity ; or of any wholesale Aurignacian conquest ; 

 or of any superior mentality of the early 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, sui:)erior 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 exactly, except for 

 technical differences in stone-chipping, as did their crude prede- 

 cessors ? And how shall we explain the anomalous fact of an invasion 

 during the last ice encroachment, an unfavorable period, when man 

 might logically 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, critical workers, well equipped, and 

 unhampered by tradition. 



