II54 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



a twig, now withered and dead, of the human branch". His place 

 was taken by unmistakably finer post-glacial men, of the reindeer 

 age, to whom we shall presently turn. 



(5) In 192 1, Mr. W. E. Barren, a mining engineer, making his 

 round in the great Broken Hill Cave in Northern Rhodesia, came 

 across a black labourer thrusting his pick among a medley of 

 animal bones exposed by a successful blasting. With a keen eye for 

 the unusual, he intervened just in time to save the skull of Rhodesian 

 man — "the most complete and important document that has yet 

 lain on the anthropologist's table". It was much in the same way 

 that Mr. Dawson — a scholarly lawyer — saved the Piltdown skull 

 from forming part of road-mending material — the probable end of 

 not a few of our ancient forerunners. At Broken Hill, however, 

 remains of at least two skeletons were preserved for science. The 

 remains were not fossilised; the teeth are unique in showing caries, 

 a disease never before observed in a pre-historic skull. The associated 

 bones in the cave were those of living species; yet their date is 

 Early Pleistocene, probably less than one hundred and twenty-five 

 thousand years ago. 



What is it that makes the remains of Rhodesian man so interest- 

 ing? It is that his skull suggests the common ancestor of the 

 Neanderthal and the modern types. His body skeleton is modern, 

 but "in his skull he combines the cranial feature of the Australian 

 aboriginal and of the La Chapelle man". Sir Arthur Keith, who has 

 studied Rhodesian man with rare skill, says: "His just place seems 

 to be in the modem stem, soon after this stem had broken away from 

 the Neanderthal line. It is just because his origin lies so close to 

 that of Neanderthal man that Rhodesian man has so much of this 

 type still in him. He stands to the modern type in almost the same 

 ancestral relationship as Heidelberg man does to Neanderthal 

 man." 



The general fact that stands out is that in early Pleistocene times, 

 probably not much more than 125,000 years ago, England, Germany, 

 and Rhodesia alike had primitive men, of a definitely human type, 

 — even in many ways modern. But the links between the Heidelberg 

 man, the Piltdown man, and the Rhodesian man on the one hand 

 and ourselves and the Cro-Magnons (apparently of finer build and 

 brain than ourselves!) on the other, are stiU awanting. Here is 

 another link stiU missing; the first being between the origin of the 

 humanoid stem and Pithecanthropus, or whatever other tentative 

 man may have preceded him. We cannot leave Rhodesian man 

 without noticing that besides the dental caries already mentioned, 

 he had dental abscesses and considerable rheumatism. His skuU, 

 like the later Boskop skuU, shows ear-lesions "of an obscure and 

 puzzling nature". 



Beyond these Rhodesian remains it is not necessary for our 



