Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

At first, quite erroneously, this was associated with the so-called race of Cannstatt, but long before Schwalbe's work it was recognized by King,[(33)] in 1864, as a distinct species of man (Homo neanderthalensis) 'the man of the Neander valley.' Not long after the discovery of the Neanderthaloids of Spy, in Belgium, Cope,[(34)] in 1893, proposed the same specific name of Homo neanderthalensis. In 1897 Wilser[(35)] suggested the name of Homo primigenius, which has been widely adopted in Germany, while among French authors the same species of man is sometimes known to-day as Homo mousteriensis. This variety of names serves at least to record the unanimous opinion that this mid-Pleistocene man belongs to a distinct species.

Since the race was very widely distributed, we may speak of these people as the 'Neanderthals,' while races resembling the Neanderthal species may be characterized as 'Neanderthaloid.' The complete series of discoveries of members of this race is now very large indeed.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE REMAINS OF THE NEANDERTHALS

(Compare Fig. 104)

1. Of Unknown Lower Palæolithic Times
1848.		Gibraltar.		Forbes Quarry.		Fragmentary skull.
1856.		Neanderthal.		Düsseldorf, Germany.		Skullcap and skeletal fragments.
1859.		Arcy-sur-Cure.		Yonne, France.		1 lower jaw.
1866.		La Naulette.		Belgium.		1 lower jaw.
1888.		Malarnaud.		Ariège, France.		1 lower jaw.
		? Gourdan.		Hautes-Pyrénées.		1 lower jaw.
1906.		Ochos.		Moravia.		1 lower jaw.
2. With Late Mousterian Industry
1887.		Spy I, II.		Near Dinant, Belgium.		Two skulls and skeletons.
1907.		Petit-Puymoyen.		Charente, France.		Fragments of upper and lower jaws.
1909.		Pech de l'Azé.		Dordogne, France.		Skull of a child.
1910.		La Ferrassie II.		Dordogne, France.		1 skeleton (female).
1911.		La Cotte de St. Brelade.		Isle of Jersey.		13 human teeth.
1911.		La Quina II.		Charente, France.		Skull and fragments of skeleton.
3. With Middle Mousterian Industry
1882.		Šipka.		Moravia.		Jaw of a child.
1908.		La Chapelle-aux-Saints.		Corrèze, France.		Almost complete skull and skeleton.
1909.		La Ferrassie I.		Dordogne, France.		Portions of one skeleton.
1910.		La Quina I.		Charente, France.		Foot bones.
4. With Early Mousterian Industry
1908.		Le Moustier.		Vézère Valley, Dordogne, France.		Skeleton of a youth.
1914.		Ehringsdorf.[(37)]		Near Weimar.		Lower jaw.
5. With Mousterian or Acheulean Industry
1899.		Krapina.		Croatia, Austria-Hungary.		Portions of many skeletons of adults and of children.
1892.		Taubach.		Near Weimar.		1 milk tooth.

In the year 1887 the Belgian geologists Fraipont and Lohest[(36)] discovered in a grotto near Spy, not far from Dinant on the Meuse, the remains of two individuals which are now distinguished as Spy I and Spy II. In the same stratum with the skeletons, beneath a layer of tufaceous limestone, flint implements of Mousterian age were embedded, together with remains of the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave-bear, and cave-hyæna. This discovery is one of the most important in the history of anthropology, because it definitely dated the Spy men as belonging to the period of Mousterian industry, and also because the authors immediately recognized these men as belonging to the race of Neanderthal and of Cannstatt, which at the time were supposed to be the same. Here for the first time the proportions of the cranium and the brain, the very primitive features of the lower jaw and of the teeth, the low stature, and several ape-like characters of the limb bones became known; here were observed the prominent supraorbital ridges of the Neanderthal type, the receding forehead, the cranial profile inferior to that of the lowest existing Australian races, the narrow, dolichocephalic skull. The limbs were found to have retained the anthropoid disproportion between the thigh-bone and the shin-bone, and the important discovery was made that this short, massively built, heavy-browed, dull-visaged Neanderthal man was unable to stand absolutely erect, the structure of the knee-joint being such that the knees were constantly slightly bent. In other words, the Spy man had not yet fully acquired the erect position of the lower limbs.

Fig. 108. Skull known as Spy I, discovered in 1887, in front of the grotto of Spy, near Namur, Belgium. After Kraemer. One-quarter life size.

This discovery may be said to have established the Neanderthals in all their characters as a very distinct low race, but twenty-two years elapsed before this was further confirmed by the finding of another and still earlier type of Neanderthaloid at Krapina, in northern Croatia, Austria-Hungary, as described at the close of Chapter II (p. 181 above); a type which with its local variations was soon determined as unquestionably belonging in the same group with the man of Neanderthal and the men of Spy.

Many years before, namely, in 1866, the Belgian anthropologist Dupont[(38)] had discovered the remains of another member of this race in a grotto on the bank of the River Lesse, near La Naulette, not far from Furfooz, in northern Belgium. This is now known as the La Naulette jaw and is found to be of Neanderthal type. It was associated with bones of the woolly mammoth, the rhinoceros, the reindeer, and a few fragments of other human bones.