62 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



man after the advent of the Crô-Magnons. Neanderthal man's 

 end is thus striking and dramatic, if only on account of its apparent 

 suddenness. 



So much for his end. But what of his beginning? Where did 

 he originate and what are his affiliations? 



The answers we can give to these questions today must, in the 

 light of our recent discoveries, be quite different from those formerly 

 given and generally accepted. 



As long as we regarded Pithecanthropus as standing in the direct 

 line of man's ancestry and connecting us with our homosimian 

 progenitors; and Neanderthal man as manifesting a later and further 

 phase, along the same lines of development, his low, pithecoid char- 

 acters were taken for granted and caused no surprise. Primitive 

 man must have presented just such an appearance and possessed 

 just such characters, it was thought; but when Eoanthropus came 

 to light, with his vastly greater antiquity and yet exhibiting cranial 

 characters strikingly modern in all respects save the thickness of the 

 skull, such views could no longer be entertained and the presence of 

 these low characters in Neanderthal man had to be otherwise ac- 

 counted for. But more than that followed upon the discovery of 

 Eoanthropus and made the problem before us more complex. It 

 led to the reconsideration of the geological evidence of the antiquity 

 of the High-terrace men, with the result that they were placed in 

 their rightful order in the scale of time. Viewing Neanderthal man 

 as we did, and finding him living in an age so relatively near to our 

 own as the Mousterian epoch, we had done violence to the evidence 

 of the ant'quity of the High-terrace men because of their comparatively 

 higher development and superior cranial characters and had regarded 

 them as subsequent in time to Neanderthal man, in spite of the fact 

 that all the geological evidence relative to their discovery bore wit- 

 ness to their greater age and pointed to a period antedating the 

 Mousterian epoch by thousands of years. 



These facts make the presence of so degenerate and pithecoid 

 a race as Homo neanderthalensis, at so relatively late a period in 

 human history, a still greater anomaly and a more perplexing pro- 

 blem. What then is the explanation of such a race as Neanderthal 

 man, sandwiched in, as it were, between the relatively-advanced 

 High-terrace men on the one hand and the highly-developed Crô- 

 Magnons on the other? 



The simplest explanation is to accept the view now becoming 

 general, namely, that when man was in the making Nature turned out 

 more than one specimen of him. In other words, we must give up 



