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

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Disappearance of the Neanderthal Race

We have seen that the Neanderthals dwelt in Europe for a very long time, many thousands of years, during which they doubtless underwent considerable evolution from lower to higher types, and into varieties, under the modifying influences of climate, food, and racial habits. Consequently the known remains of Neanderthals exhibit a decided variation in head form, as well as in dentition: some are more primitive and ape-like; others, such as Spy II, are more like the modern races. The Krapina variety is more broad-headed than the typical Neanderthal variety. The Gibraltar variety is in many respects of low type. The individual known as Spy II is of higher type than the other Neanderthals. The variations in stature so far as known are slight.

For these and other reasons Hrdlička,[(77)] who has recently made a broad comparative study of the chief Neanderthal remains of Europe, is of the opinion that the Neanderthals partly evolved into the lower races of Homo sapiens; being not only in some measure ancestral to such very primitive forms as the Brünn or Předmost race of Upper Palæolithic times, but even contributing to the higher race of the Crô-Magnons. He also holds that traces of Neanderthal blood and physiognomy are not lacking even among modern Europeans.

A contrary view is set forth in the present volume; namely, that the Neanderthals represent a side branch of the human race which became wholly extinct in western Europe. This view the author shares with Boule and with Schwalbe. Certainly the evidence afforded by the known Upper Palæolithic burial sites does not support the theory that the Neanderthals persisted. It is possible, however, that the Upper Palæolithic skeletons discovered at Předmost, and now awaiting description by Maška, may modify this conclusion and demonstrate Hrdlička's theory that the Neanderthals survived and left descendants or men of mixed Neanderthal and Homo sapiens race along the valley of the Danube.

Whatever may have been their fate in other regions, certainly the most sudden racial change which we know of in the whole prehistory of western Europe is the disappearance of the Neanderthal race at the close of the Mousterian culture stage, which was the latest industrial period of Lower Palæolithic times, and their replacement by the Crô-Magnon race. From geologic evidence the date of this replacement is believed to have been between 20,000 and 25,000 years before our era. So far as we know at present, the Neanderthals were entirely eliminated; no trace of the survival of the pure Neanderthal type has been found in any of the Upper Palæolithic burial sites; nor have the alleged instances of the survival of the Neanderthal strain or of people bearing the Neanderthal cranial characters been substantiated. We incline to agree with Boule and Schwalbe that the supposed cases among modern races of the transmission of Neanderthal characters are simply low or reversional types, which, upon close analysis, are never found to present the highly distinctive and peculiar combination of Neanderthal characteristics.

There is some reason to believe that the Neanderthals were degenerating physically and industrially during the very severe conditions of life of the fourth glaciation, but the consequent inferiority and diminution in numbers would not account for their total extinction, and we are inclined to attribute this to the entrance into the whole Neanderthal country of western Europe toward the close of Lower Palæolithic times of a new and highly superior race. Archæologists find traces of a new culture and industry in certain Mousterian stations preceding the disappearance of the typical Mousterian industry. Such a mingling is found in the valley of the Somme in northern France.

From this scanty evidence we may infer that the new race competed for a time with the Neanderthals before they dispossessed them of their principal stations and drove them out of the country or killed them in battle. The Neanderthals, no doubt, fought with wooden weapons and with the stone-headed dart and spear, but there is no evidence that they possessed the bow and arrow. There is, on the contrary, some possibility that the newly arriving Crô-Magnon race may have been familiar with the bow and arrow, for a barbed arrow or spear head appears in drawings of a later stage of Crô-Magnon history, the so-called Magdalenian. It is thus possible, though very far from being demonstrated, that when the Crô-Magnons entered western Europe, at the dawn of the Upper Palæolithic, they were armed with weapons which, with their superior intelligence and physique, would have given them a very great advantage in contests with the Neanderthals.

(1) Commont, 1912.1, p. 294.