"Men of the Old Stone Age" 



By G. ELLIOT SMITH 



Professor of Analomy and Dean of the Ka<-iilly of Mcdii-iiii". Iliiivorsily of Manchester, England 



IT is only sixty-eight years since there 

 first came to light a skull that can be 

 called really old in the geological sense. 

 Lieutenant Flint, of the Royal Artillery, 

 found this historic specimen in the Forbes 

 Quarry at Gibraltar in 1848, and presented 

 it to the Gibraltar Scientific Society; but it 

 was not until 1862 when Mr. Busk saw it that 

 any special importance came to be attached to 

 it; and it was then transferred to the Museum 

 of the Royal College of Surgeons in England. 

 But, in the meantime. Dr. Fuhlrott in 1857 

 recovered from a limestone cave in the 

 Neanderthal, near Diisseldorf, the fragments 

 of a human skeleton of like age, including 

 the upper part of a skull whose more obtrusive 

 features, no less than the fact that it came at 

 once into the hands of a competent anatomist, 

 rivetted attention upon it as the relic of a 

 hitherto unknown type of humanity. From 

 the moment when this anatomist (Professor 

 Schaafhaasen) claimed that "the extraordi- 

 nary form of the skull was due to a natural 

 conformation hitherto not known to exist, 

 even in the most barbarous races" and that 

 the "human relics were traceable to a period 

 at which the latest animals of the diluvium 

 still existed," a lively controversy was 

 started, and, with the addition of the highly 

 inflammable material supplied by the appear- 

 ance of Charles Darwin's classical work, 

 developed into a great conflagration. As 

 Huxley remarked, many years afterward; — ■ 

 " It was suggested that the Neanderthal skele- 

 ton was that of a strayed idiot; that the 

 characters of the skull were the result of 

 early synostosis or of late gout; and, in 

 fact, any stick was good enough to beat the 

 dog withal." 



Since then many more remains of a varietj' 

 of ancient tj'pes of mankind have come to 

 light, as well as a great deal of information 

 relating to early human handiwork and 

 achievements, the animals which these men of 

 the Old Stone age hunted, and the conditions 

 under which they lived. 



Almost every new discovery has started 

 afresh such disputes as followed the finding 

 of the Neanderthal skull; and history has 



repeated itself with remarkable consistency. 

 For these discussions have invariably fol- 

 lowed closely the lines so crisply described 

 l)y Huxley in the case of the Neanderthal 

 skull. Long before the discovery of these 

 actual fragments of the man of the Old Stone 

 age, archaeologists had become aware of his 

 former existence by finding implements of 

 human workmanship in caves and in ancient 

 gravels, often in association with the bones of 

 extinct mammals. But it was not until the 

 year 1887 that the Belgian scientists, Frai- 

 pont and Lohest, made the discovery, one of 

 the most important and fundamental in the 

 whole history of the growth of our knowledge 

 of early man, that the Neanderthal people 

 were the makers of the type of stone imple- 

 ments which are now called Mousterian, and 

 that they were contemporaneous with the 

 woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, 

 the cave bear, and the cave hyaena in Western 

 Europe. 



This clearer vision of Mousterian man 

 {Homo neanderthalensis) in his natural sur- 

 roundings stimulated further enquiries; and 

 as the result of a long series of remarkable 

 discoveries, no less than of the intensive 

 investigation of the known material, espe- 

 cially by Schwalbe and Boule among many 

 others, we now have a surprisingly full view 

 of the physical characters and the achieve- 

 ments of this peculiarly distinctive type of 

 humanity, which occupied Europe many 

 thousands of years (Professor Osborn be- 

 lieves more than twenty-five millennia) ago. 



The information that has been accumu- 

 lating has illuminated not merely the Mous- 

 terian phase of industry and Neanderthal 

 man, but has revealed also a long succession 

 of later cultural phases and waves of varying 

 types of humanity, all of which, however, 

 differ from the men of the Lower Palaeolithic 

 age in conforming much more nearly to the 

 modern type. 



The last twenty-two years have also 

 brought to light the fragments of three di- 

 vergent and much more primitive types of 

 humanity, the genus Pithecanthropus, found 

 in Java in 1894 by Dubois; the Heidelberg 



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