Palaeontology. — “On the Cranial Form of Homo Neandertalensis 
and of Pithecanthropus Erectus, Determined by Mechanical 
Factors’. By Prof. Eve. Dusots. 
(Communicated at the meeting of Nov. 26, 1921). 
All well known fossil men can be ranged around two principal 
types, differing so much that they must at least be distinguished as 
species of one genus. One type is that of Homo sapiens, the modern 
species of Man. It is true that different races may be recognized 
also among the fossil representatives of this species. Thus — to 
mention only the earliest — the eskimo-like race of Chancelade, 
living in France with a steppe fauna, after the fourth or last Glacial 
epoch of the Alps (during the dry period, when the trees grew in 
our country the remains of which we find as the “sand-stubs” under 
the peat moors); the race of Cro-Magnon, living in France and 
elsewhere in West Europe during the Reindeer period, that fourth 
Glacial-epoch (in which the deposition of the upper ‘“Sand-diluvium” 
took place in the southern part of our country), which race is not 
to be distinguished from some recent West European and North 
African tribes. Of somewhat earlier. date is the negroid race of 
Grimaldi, near Mentone on the Mediterranean, almost certainly 
closely akin to the present-day Bushmen of South-Africa. Probably 
still older is the australoid Man of Wadjak, Java. 
This fact of the differentiation of fossil Homo sapiens into still 
existing forms, which none of them were at a really lower stage 
of morphological evolution than the corresponding recent races, leads 
us to assume for the origin of this type a much earlier date than 
the time of its earliest remains. This follows immediately after the 
period of the Mammoth, the third Glacial epoch of the Alps (when 
the northern half of our country lay covered under an ice sheet), 
in which time Homo neandertalensis, the other species of Man, lived. 
The Heidelberg Man, a neandertaloid form, which is still more sharply 
distinguished from the sapiens-type than the Neandertalian proper, 
which latter died out soon after the Mammoth epoch, lived in the 
second Glacial epoch of the Alps (during which the upper part of 
the ‘Fluviatile Gravel-diluvium’’ was deposited in the soil of the 
Netherlands) or — which is more probable, judging from the accom- 
panying fauna — in the second Interglacial or Hippopotamus-epoch 
(the period’ of our ‘‘potclay’’), 
