32 Proceedings 
the body of his antagonist. Dr. Wilser however thinks he is 
swinging himself up into a tree, an attitude with which the 
position of the arms hardly agrees. The hips are sharply, and 
the knees slightly, bent, so’ that Piette seems to have thought 
the creature was dancing. He points out a number of decidedly 
simian characters. The face is a muzzle (I admit more canine . 
than simian), the forehead retreats, the skull is flattened at the 
top and does not project in the least behind. The assumption 
of the erect posture by man is accompanied by the shifting of 
the foramen or spinal orifice from the back of the skull, where 
it is with apes, towards the centre. Although the upper arms 
are very short, which Piette would ascribe to an error in draw- 
ing, the fore-arms are very long. The trunk and belly are sim- 
ian in form, and apparently covered with hair. As in apes,there 
is no inward curve to the back; man’s doubly-curved spine is 
~also connected with his erect posture. The buttocks and calves 
are flat, as in apes, and the legs short. The feet are badly drawn, 
being too thick and short for human feet, neither are they pre- 
hensile organs, but are suited to the vertical position. Piette 
dismisses the idea that it is an anthropoid ape, these being, as 
far as we know, all frugivorous tree-climbers of the tropics, in- 
capable of living under the semi-arctic conditions of Pleistocene 
Central Europe. The only known French apes lived in the hot 
climate of the Miocene. A higher form, which had adopted the 
walking habit, and with it a different diet, might, he thinks, 
have lived in France in this cold period. He concludes that the 
figure represents a relative of the Pithecanthropus, more nearly 
related to man than any ape. The artist cannot have made a 
fantastic combination of man and ape without travelling to 
equatorial regions, which is out of the question. Besides, these 
cave-artists were most stringent realists. 
In the same cave, Piette afterwards discovered a much rough- 
er sketcht of a man whose great toe is shorter than the others, 
and widely separated from them, just as in the prehensile foot 
of an ape. By a curious error of drawing, the great toe is on 
the outer side of the foot. The hip and knee are sharply flexed. 
+ Figured in Wilser, of. c#¢. p. 28. 
