THE PALANJHROPIC AGE 63 



development of the muscular processes, the extreme 

 wearing of the teeth among a people who pre- 

 dominantly lived on flesh and not on grain, the 

 obliteration of the sutures of the skull, along with 

 indications of slow ossification of the ends of the long 

 bones, point in this direction, and seem to indicate a 

 slow maturity and great length of life in this most 

 primitive race. 



The picture would be incomplete did we not add 

 that Quatrefages has described a single skull, that of 

 Truchere, from deposits of this age, which shows 

 that these gigantic men were contemporaneous with 

 a feebler race of smaller stature and with different 

 cranial characters, and inhabiting in all likelihood a 

 more eastern region. 



It is further significant that there is evidence to 

 show that the larger and stronger race was that which 

 prevailed in Europe at the time of its greatest elevation 

 above the sea and greatest horizontal extent, and 

 when its fauna included many large quadrupeds now 

 extinct. This race of giants was thus in the posses- 

 sion of a greater continental area than that now 

 existing, and had to contend with gigantic brute 

 rivals for the possession of the world. It is also not 

 improbable that this early race became extinct in 

 Europe in consequence of the physical changes which 

 occurred in connection with the subsidence that 

 reduced the land to its present limits, and that the 

 feebler race which succeeded came in as the appro- 

 priate accompaniment of a diminished land-surface 



