138 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
admirable description of the skeleton from La-Chapelle-aux-Saints by 
Prof. Marcellin Boule in his classical memoir in the Annales de Paléon- 
tologie. ‘This and the earlier accounts of more fragmentary remains from 
the Neanderthal cave in Germany and the Spy cave in Belgium, have led 
to the prevalent idea that the type of man in question exhibited too many 
degenerate features added to his ape-characters, to be the ancestor of the 
modern Homo sapiens. A few years ago, however, Dr. Ales Hrdlicka 
pointed out that other skulls of Neanderthal man, especially those from 
central Europe and the fragment found by Mr. Turville Petre in Galilee, 
Palestine, were less different from the skull of modern man than most of 
the western European examples, and Homo neanderthalensis might, after 
all, prove to be the ancestor of Homo sapiens if he could be traced to his 
source. At last, through the discoveries of Miss Dorothy Garrod and 
Mr. Theodore McCown in the caves of Mt. Carmel, Palestine, we seem 
to be approaching that source. ‘They have disentombed a series of buried 
skeletons which are nearly complete ; and according to the preliminary 
reports on the collection by Mr. McCown and Sir Arthur Keith, they 
belong to a race which exhibited a remarkable mingling of the characters 
of Neanderthal and modern man. They seem to show us modern man 
in the making. 
Even the latest phases in the development of stone-age man appear to 
have begun in Asia, as already generally admitted. It is usually difficult 
to distinguish the skeletons of domestic animals from those of wild animals, 
but Raphael Pumpelly’s discoveries in Turkestan show that domestica- 
tion of several familiar animals was probably beginning there at a very 
early date in Neolithic times. 
Until typical Homo sapiens had come into being, man’s only outlet from 
Asia seems to have been by land in the direction of Europe and Africa. 
As soon, however, as he had attained this final stage of development he 
must have been able to construct rafts or boats, by which he crossed the 
‘‘ narrew seas of the East Indies to Australia, and.perhaps the equally 
narrow seas at Behring Straits to North America. 
AUSTRALASIA. 
Australia is shown by its past and present animal life to have been 
separated by sea from the rest of the world during the whole of the 
Tertiary era, including Pleistocene times, and it was isolated too early 
to be inhabited by the ancestors of the apes. Man is therefore certainly 
an immigrant from overseas, and we know that he reached the country 
when various relatively large Pleistocene marsupials were still living there, 
because a fossil human skull has been found at Talgai in Queensland 
directly associated with their remains. This skull is essentially the same 
as that of the existing Australian aborigines, who have retained a mode 
of life like that of the latest Paleolithic hunters of the mainland. Some 
of the immigrants evidently took with them a semi-domesticated dog, 
the dingo, of which fossil remains have been found in old inhabited 
sites. 
