548 NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 



istic (Mousterian) style. He used fire; he furnished his dead 

 with an outfit for a long journey; he had a big brain. But 

 he had great beetling, ape-like eyebrow-ridges and massive 

 jaws, and he showed " simian characters swarming in the 

 details of his structure". Prof. William King, a quiet 

 worker at Queen's College, Galway, protested in 1864 against 

 Huxley's conclusion that the Neanderthal man was merely 

 an extreme variant of the modern type, and proposed to es- 

 tablish a new species, Homo neanderthalensis ; and this is 

 the view generally accepted to-day. It seems certain that, 

 although the Neanderthaler had many anthropoid features, 

 he was not a low type, that he had his own peculiar adapta- 

 tions and specialisations, and that he was not ancestral to 

 modern man. Indeed, men of the modern type seem to have 

 been in existence when the Neanderthal man was still living. 

 What may the Neanderthaler have thought of his own 

 species dwindling and another taking its place, — another 

 which he perhaps despised? What if there had been no 

 other ? 



Again the story repeats itself, and there is a divergence 

 of another branch from the main human stem. We refer 

 to the early Briton of the Sussex Weald — the Piltdown skull, 

 one of the interesting discoveries of the beginning of the 

 twentieth century. There is abundant uncertainty, one must 

 admit, but the Piltdown skull perhaps dates from an early 

 phase of the Pleistocene or from a late phase of the Pliocene 

 epoch, perhaps half a million years ago. Its great interest 

 is its remarkable mixture, e.g., in teeth and jaws, of simian 

 and human characters. The anthropoid characters of the 

 mouth, teeth, and face, the massive and ill-filled skull, the 

 simian characters of the brain and its primitive and pre- 

 human appearance are held by Dr. Arthur Keith to justify 



