PALEOLITHIC ENGLISHMEN 
79 
and the hearths which were superimposed, and particularly 
the conditions of the bones themselves, one would not 
have suspected that this was the skull of a man who 
lived many thousands of years ago. The bones when 
originally found were soft ; when dried they became hard, 
porcellanous, and brown in colour. Now — a year later — 
they have become of a light, stone-grey colour, with 
absolutely no animal matter left in them. When placed 
in a solution of hydrochloric acid, they crumble into a 
fine, grey sediment. 
Of the face, no clear picture can be drawn. All the 
bones between the lower jaw below, and the forehead 
above, had been dissolved away in the brick earth. The 
dimensions of the lower jaw suggest a face of moderate 
length, contracted at its lower part, especially at the 
jowls or angles of the mandible, in front of and below 
the ears. The chin is moderately developed, narrow 
and peaked in shape ; the height of the mandible at 
the symphysis is 30 mm., its thickness, 14 mm. — both 
moderate dimensions. The width between the angles of 
the jaw was 96 mm.; the bicondylar width, 120 mm. — 
measurements which the expert anatomist will recognise 
as moderate for even modern men. The zygomatic or 
cheek arches were broken, but the total width of the 
face could not have appreciably exceeded the modern 
average. 
The characters of the skull and skeleton leave no 
doubt as to the sex : the skeleton was that of a man, and 
from the condition of the sutures between the bones of 
the skull — all of which were open — a man not over forty 
years of age, probably considerably under. For a man 
of this age the teeth were in a surprisingly bad condition. 
They were deeply worn ; the enamel had disappeared by 
wear from the chewing surfaces of the crowns, exposing 
the dentine, and, in some cases, the pulp cavities. Of 
the six molar teeth of the lower jaw, five had been lost 
from disease — not from caries, but from abscesses or 
gumboils forming at their roots. One of the premolar 
teeth had also perished before death ; the incisors, canine, 
