A skull of uncertain geologic age, found in 1888 at Galley Hill, near London, is by some linked with the Brünn race. The same is true of an unusually well preserved skeleton found in 1909 at Combe-Capelle, in Périgord, southern France. The period of the Combe-Capelle skeleton is Upper Palæolithic Aurignacian. This was part of the era of the Cro-Magnon race in western Europe; and as the Combe-Capelle remains do not differ much from the Cro-Magnon type, they are best considered as belonging to it.
18. The Grimaldi Race: Neolithic Races
The Grimaldi race is to date represented by only two skeletons, those of a woman and a youth—possibly mother and son—found in 1906 in a grotto at Grimaldi near Mentone, in Italy, close to the French border. They reposed in lower layers, above which subsequent Cro-Magnon burials of Aurignacian date had been made. Their age is therefore early Aurignacian: the beginning of the Upper Palæolithic or later Cave period of the Old Stone Age. The statures are 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 1 inch—the youth was not fully grown; the skull capacities 1,375 and nearly 1,600 c.c.
The outstanding feature of both skeletons is that they bear a number of Negroid characteristics. The forearm and lower leg are long as compared with the upper arm and thigh; the pelvis high and small; the jaws prognathous, the nose flat, the eye orbits narrow. All these are Negro traits. This is important, in view of the fact that all the other ancient fossils of men are either more primitive than the living races or, like Cro-Magnon, perhaps ancestral to the Caucasian race.
No fossil remains of any ancestral Mongolian type have yet been discovered.
The New Stone Age, beginning about 10,000 or 8,000 B.C., brings the Grenelle and other types of man; but these are so essentially modern that they need not be considered here. In the Neolithic period, broad heads are for the first time encountered, as they occur at present in Europe and other continents, alongside of narrow ones. The virtual fixity of the human type for these last ten thousand years is by no means incredible. Egyptian mummies and skeletons prove that the type of that country has changed little in five thousand years except as the result of invasions and admixture.
19. The Metric Expression of Human Evolution
The relations of the several fossil types of man and their gradual progression are most accurately expressed by certain skull angles and proportions, or indexes, which have been specially devised for the purpose. The anthropometric criteria that are of most importance in the study of living races, more or less fail in regard to prehistoric man. The hair, complexion, and eye-color are not preserved. The head breadth, as indicated by the cephalic index, is substantially the same from Pithecanthropus to the last Cro-Magnons. Stature on the other hand varies from one to another ancient race without evincing much tendency to grow or to diminish consistently. Often, too, there is only part of a skull preserved. The following proportions of the top or vault of the skull—the calvarium—are therefore useful for expressing quantitatively the gradual physical progress of humanity from its beginning.
Three anatomical points on the surface of the skull are the pivots on which these special indexes and angles rest. One is the Glabella (G in [figure 7]), the slight swelling situated between the eyebrows and above the root of the nose. The second is the Inion (I), the most rearward point on the skull. The third is the Bregma (B) or point of intersection of the sutures which divide the frontal from the parietal bones. The bregma falls at or very near the highest point of the skull.