THE HUMAN DENTITION 145 



features will not be the same. It might seem, therefore, that 

 the Neandertal type is really ancestral to our own race as 

 indeed has been and is the view of many anatomists; that all 

 human races have passed at some period or other of their his- 

 tory through a Neandertal stage. This is a question difficult 

 to settle in any case and quite impossible if we consider only 

 the teeth. Stress has been laid upon the fact that there seems 

 to be an unusually large number of specialized features, many 

 of them present to a pronounced degree, in the dentition of 

 Neandertal Man. More than this we know that he could not 

 be the direct ancestor at least of Aurignacian Man since both 

 lived in the same period. The features in which the Neander- 

 tal dentition differs from that of H. aurignacensis or of 

 modern Man are largely secondary specializations many of 

 which are present also in Anthropoids as the result of parallel 

 evolution. These indicate the specialized and aberrant con- 

 dition of Neandertal Man so strongly confirmed by the char- 

 acters of other parts of the skeleton. It is true that there 

 were many variations in Neandertal Man as there are in mod- 

 ern Europeans, which variations affect not alone the skull and 

 skeleton but also the teeth, and hence the dentition of the ex- 

 ample described stands no more typical of all than a single 

 example would represent every variety in the dentition of 

 modern Europeans. Indeed so pronounced and aberrant are 

 certain features exhibited by some Neandertal teeth that we 

 must briefly consider these peculiarities. 



Examination by the radiographic method of the mandible of 

 a great Anthropoid or a modern human being shows the roots 

 of the teeth varying somewhat in length, in disposition and in 

 relation to the inferior dental canal. In the majority of cases 

 one feature is apparent in all, namely, that the pulp chamber, 

 though small, is well defined and lies entirely or almost en- 

 tirely outside the limit of the alveolar process of the jaw. In 

 the Heidelberg mandible the pulp chamber is less sharply out- 

 lined and although its limits do not greatly extend beloAv the 

 free alveolar border still the pulp chamber is large and its 



