152 



NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



divergent line of the genus H o m o which became extinct before 

 the present era, while Homo sapiens represents the develop- 

 ment of another line which paleontological discoveries made up to 

 the present time do not permit us to follow into the Middle 

 Quaternary. 



The recent discoveries at Piltdown and Heidelberg have a definite 

 bearing on this hypothesis ; although greatly different in many de- 

 tails of structure from the Homo neanderthalensis, the 

 Heidelberg jaw nevertheless does not present any essential differ- 

 ences from the latter. It is without doubt more robust, shows more 

 pronounced primitive characters, but M. Boule has shown that it 

 might well be adapted to the cranium of La Chapelle-aux-Saints 



'/, 



'f///'7"//rw'' 



(V * s 

 ft. 



A reindeer grazing, from the cavern of Kesslerloch near Thayugen, 

 Switzerland, engraved on a shaft-straightener. A Magdalenian masterpiece. 

 After Sottas Courtesy American Museum of Natural History 



without sensibly changing its general aspect, and if we consider that 

 it carries us back to an epoch anterior to that in which the man of 

 the Middle Pleistocene lived, we can see in it one of the primitive 

 stages of the latter; or, otherwise speaking, we may suppose that 

 Homo heidelbergensis represents in the Lower Pleisto- 

 cene the ancestral form of Homo neanderthalensis. 



The discovery at Piltdown is of more delicate interpretation and 

 this is because of the fragmentary condition of the remains. The 

 jaw is distinctly pithecoid, although the cranium appears much more 

 related to that of recent man than to that of the Homo nean- 

 derthalensis. At first sight one can not fail to be surprised 



