THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



was supposed that this Neander Valley man suf- 

 fered from softening of the bones when a baby, 

 from gout when an old man, and that at some 

 time in his life his skull had been crushed by a 

 blow and healed imperfectly. And in this way 

 the bumps over the eyes and the other strange 

 characteristics were supposed to have been pro- 

 duced. But this very daring assumption, which 

 looked far-fetched when examined in detail, was 

 refuted when Professor Fraipont, in 1887, dis- 

 covered two human skeletons in another cave 

 near Namur (France), the so-called cave of Spy. 

 These skeletons had skulls with the same strange 

 bumps on them. One could not easily assume 

 that all these individuals had endured the same 

 improbable sufferings. Some time after that, a 

 whole mass of remains of such bones, belonging 

 to not less than ten individuals of different ages, 

 were found near Krapina in Austria. They evi- 

 dently represented the remains of a prehistoric 

 cannibal feast, and the poor victims who had 

 been roasted on that occasion had all of them 

 the same structure of skull as that of the Neander 

 Valley man. And, finally Schwalbe and Klaatsch 

 have demonstrated scientifically that the Neander 

 Valley bones were not at all diseased. 



It is quite certain, then, that a type of man 



28 



