CHAPTER VIII 
THE ANATOMICAL PECULIARITIES OF NEANDERTHAL MAN 
In the two preceding chapters attention has been con- 
centrated on the various sites and dates at which the 
remains of Neanderthal man have been found, and on 
the varying place which has been assigned to him by 
anthropologists. We have seen him regarded as the 
product of disease, of Nature in a freakish mood, as an 
ancestral form of man, representing the stage mankind 
passed through during the Pleistocene period, as an 
extreme variant of modern man which had retained 
an undue proportion of simian or ape-like characteristics. 
Then we reached our present concept of him as a 
separate and peculiar species of man, which died out 
during, or soon after, the Mousterian period. All the 
time we have been talking round him, as it were, never 
attempting to lay bare or analyse those features which 
mark him off from all the modern races and varieties of 
mankind, and give him, in the eye of the anthropologist, 
an altogether novel and peculiar position. 
To make the structural differences between the 
Neanderthal and modern species of mankind clear we 
cannot do better than select those two Pleistocene skulls 
found in the region of the Dordogne — the one at Combe 
Capelle representing the modern type, and the other 
from La Chapelle-aux- Saints, the Neanderthal type. 
In the instances chosen, the Neanderthal is the larger 
in all dimensions, save one. It is the more capacious, 
having the larger brain capacity ; it is longer and wider, 
but it is not so high ; its vault is peculiarly low. The 
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