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

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Similarly the Neanderthal man has a very short forearm, only 73.8 per cent of the upper arm; it approaches the proportions seen in the Eskimos, Lapps, and Bushmen.[(66)] Here, again, the Neanderthal man differs from the anthropoid apes, among which the shortest forearm is that of the gorilla, having a ratio of 80 per cent.

There are other features which would tend to show that the ancestors of the Neanderthaloids had been ground dwellers rather than tree dwellers back into a very remote period of geologic time; the arms are much shorter than the legs, whereas in tree dwellers they are much longer. Thus, we have observed in the anthropoid apes that the arm is very long in proportion to the leg; in the chimpanzee, which has relatively the shortest arms among the anthropoid apes, the index is 104 per cent, that is, the arms are slightly longer than the legs. On the contrary, in the Neanderthals the arm length is only 68 per cent of the leg length; thus it is very far removed from the anthropoid-ape type and comes nearest to the Australian and African negro types.

Thus, to sum up the bodily proportions of the Neanderthals:

Arm short in proportion to leg, average index 68 per cent.

Forearm short in proportion to upper arm, average index 73.8 per cent.

Shin-bone short in proportion to thigh-bone, average index 76.6 per cent.

Stature extremely short in proportion to size of head.

The structure of the shoulder and of the chest is full of interest. All the ribs are remarkably robust and of large volume, and, whereas in existing races they exhibit a flattened section, in the Neanderthals the section is distinctly triangular in form. This implies a very muscular and robust torso in correlation with the gigantic head and stout limbs. The collar-bones are correspondingly long, presenting a ratio to the humerus exceeding 54 per cent, which is much higher than that among the average existing races; this indicates a very broad shoulder. The shoulder-blade is also very different in type from that of the higher races of men, and even from that of the higher Primates; it is extremely short and broad.

While, as noted above, the arm of the Neanderthals is relatively short and thus non-anthropoid, it presents a mingling of human and ape characters. The upper arm, or humerus, is truly of the human type, the torsion angle upon its axis being 148°, whereas in the anthropoid apes the angle of torsion never passes 141°. Among the bones of the lower arm the most significant is the radius, with which the turning movement of the hand is correlated; the structure of the head of the radius has more resemblance to that of the anthropoid apes than to that of existing species of man. The structure of the other bone of the forearm, the ulna, is also very primitive, exhibiting certain monkey characteristics.