BIOLOGY OF MAN 1153 



(4) The fourth step brings us to Neanderthal Man, Homo neander- 

 thalensis, so-called from a skull-cap and some long bones dug up 

 in 1856 in a grotto in the Neanderthal valley, through which flows 

 the Dussel, a tributary of the Rhine. Huxley regarded the depressed 

 skull-cap with its prominent eyebrow ridges as that of a primitive 

 man of our own species, and others, including Virchow, interpreted 

 the primitiveness as an expression of disease or imbecility. Before 

 that, however, in 1848 there was found the somewhat similar 

 Gibraltar skull; and the interest of anthropologists was intensified 

 by discovery after discovery of other widely scattered remains of 

 the same Neanderthal type, — such as the lower jaw of La Naulette, 

 the fossil men of Spy, in Belgium, a skeleton from La Chapelle-aux- 

 Saints in the Correze district, a fine skull from La Quina in Charente, 

 and the like from other countries. Well-preserved parts of at least 

 fifteen individuals of the Neanderthal race have now been studied. 



Neanderthal Man lived along with the Mammoth Fauna in a 

 period more remote than the Mid-Pleistocene, and he lasted till 

 after the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. He was a 

 stock}^ short-legged man, about 5 feet 3 inches in height, but slouch- 

 ing forwards. He has been described as "a clumsy, shuffling, loose- 

 jointed being of great muscular power". The skull is very large, 

 above our average ; the vault is low, the hinder part protuberant and 

 vertically compressed; the eyebrow ridges are very prominent with 

 a markedly receding forehead; the face was thrust forward like an 

 ape's; the lower jaw is strong and still chinless; the teeth indicate 

 a coarse vegetarian diet, with small game for relish. The brain was 

 large, but presented, as Boule sums up, "numerous primitive or 

 simian characters, especially in the relatively great reduction of the 

 frontal lobes and the general pattern of the convolutions". 



Sir Arthur Keith tells us that though Neanderthal Man showed 

 "simian characters swarming in the details of his structure", he was 

 neither primitive nor anthropoid. He was a man, yet an unsuccessful 

 species of Homo, and not ancestral to us. That some "neandertha- 

 loid" skulls occur in humanity to-day, showing now this, now that, 

 feature of the Neanderthal type, probably means a reversionary 

 appearance of characters of the old-fashioned Homo stock, from 

 which H. neanderthalensis and R. sapiens alike arose. But it can- 

 not, of course, be affirmed that there were never crosses between 

 the two species during the time that they lived contemporaneously. 



One wishes that it were possible to penetrate nearer Neanderthal 

 Man as a person; but the most intimate studies of the skulls and 

 the brain-casts do not carry us very far. His jaw indicates him as 

 probably a very silent man ; he was a native of the North and chilled 

 by its severities. He knew how to light a fire in his cave, and he made 

 stone implements with a style of his own. But little more can be 

 safely said of this isolated type, who seems "the terminal bloom of 



VOL. II EE 



