WHOLE VOL. SKELETAL REMAINS OF EARLY MAN IIRDLICKA 34/ 



where not over the normal limits, leads inevitably towards greater 

 efficiency attended by further bodily and mental development, which, 

 with the simultaneous elimination of the weak and less fit, are the 

 very essentials of progressive evolution. Strong evidence that a 

 relatively rapid, progressive change, both mental and i)hysical, was 

 actually taking place during the Neanderthal period, is furnished by 

 the great variability of the skeletal remains from this time. 



(5) Such evolution with attendant mutations would certainly differ 

 from region to region, as the sum of the factors affecting man differed, 

 reaching a more advanced grade where the conditions in general 

 proved the most favorable ; while to many of the less favored groups 

 disease, famine, and warfare would bring extinction. All these 

 agencies are known to science today ; only they acted with more 

 freedom of old when social organization and mutual aid were at a 

 low level. 



(6) With these processes it is conceivable, if not inevitable, that, 

 towards the height of the glacial invasion, the population decreased 

 in numbers, and that the most fit or able-to-cojie-with-the-conditions 

 group or groups eventually alone survived, to carry on. Here seems 

 to be a relatively simple, natural explanation of the progressive evo- 

 lution of the Neanderthal man, and such evolution would inevitably 

 carry his most advanced forms to those of primitive Aurignacian and 

 H. sapiens — such H. sapiens as may to this day be seen in the 

 Australian. 



(7) The physical differences observable between Neanderthal and 

 later man are essentially those of two categories, namely: (i) Re- 

 duction in musculature— that of the jaws as well as that of the body — 

 with consequent changes in the teeth, jaws, face, and vault of the 

 skull ; and (2) Changes in the supraorbital torus, of the order known 

 well to morphology as progressive infantilism. For both these cate- 

 gories of changes there are later parallelisms. Further reduction of 

 teeth, jaws, and the facial bones has taken place since IMagdalenian 

 times, and is now going on in more highly civilized man of whatever 

 racial derivation; while evolutionary "infantilism," or lesser de- 

 velopment of some of the pronounced sex and age modifications, is 

 commonly accepted as an explanation of the differences of the negrillo 

 from the negro, and for the greater average reduction of the supra- 

 orbital ridges in the negro than in the whites. It would be illogical 

 to deny the probable instrumentality of these agencies in men of an 

 earlier period. 



