Modern Man 
29 
handed. The face is relatively larger than usual in modern man, 
and the chin lacks any bony prominence. The individual would 
be only 50 to 55 years old, but most of the lower teeth were 
lost by disease. The skeleton is of rather short stature, and the 
head is relatively the largest yet known in any race of man. 
The backbone is about 2 inches shorter and somewhat stouter 
than usual in modern man. The arm is rather long. As in the 
Spy skeletons (see plaster cast in Table-case 1), the thigh-bone is 
remarkably curved, almost as in the apes ; but the whole limb 
appears to indicate an habitually upright gait. Small extensions 
of the joint-surfaces on some of the bones seem to imply that rest 
was taken in a squatting posture. 
Neanderthal man, therefore, does not exhibit any characters 
which cannot be paralleled occasionally among modern men ; but 
he is distinctly inferior in having all these lowly characters 
combined in a single individual. He has been supposed to bear 
some close relationship to the blacks surviving in the Australian 
region, but the skeleton from La-Chapelle-aux-Saints and later 
discoveries from other French caves show that there is no great 
resemblance between the two races (fig. 13). 
MODERN MAN {Homo sapiens). 
All the human remains of later date than the Neanderthal race 
are so closely similar to those of modern man, that there is no 
reason for excluding them from the species Homo sajnens. Some 
of them, such as the skull from the cavern of Engis, near Liege 
Bel gium (of which a plaster cast is placed in Table-case 1), have 
been discovered in undoubted association with bones of the 
mammoth and woolly rhinoceros and other animals which 
disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene period. They have, 
indeed, been found with all the three kinds of late Pleistocene 
implements, which are usually described as Aurignacian, Solutrean, 
and Magdalenian. The skeletons, however, are in no respects 
inferior to those even of civilised man, and the chief interest of 
their study lies in an attempt to discover to which existing races 
they bear the most intimate relationship. 
Owing to the rarity of good specimens this study has hitherto 
made very little satisfactory progress. It has also been rendered 
more difficult by the frequent uncertainty as to whether a human 
skeleton found in a particular geological stratum is really of the 
