Scientists are enthusiastic over the three great types it has brought out on the skulls of modern Indian, the cave-dwelling cannibal of three thousand years ago, and the Nebraska “Loess man,” fragments of whose skull were deposited with the glacial drift when the Missouri River bluffs were made, between ten thousand and twenty thousand years ago.
For eight years the skulls of the low-browed Loess man, found by the archeologist, Robert F. Gilder, of Omaha, have remained in the museums in Omaha, Lincoln, and at Harvard University, while science has hopelessly longed to know what a face this preglacial man must have worn.
Finally German scientists worked out an accurate system of facial measurements compiled into an elaborate table, by the use of which faces can be faithfully reconstructed over skulls. To date little has been done along this line in Europe. In America the first work in building up faces of prehistoric man has just been completed by Miss Myra Warner, clay-model artist, who has made a specialized study of this German system in the art schools of the East.
Miss Warner was handed the three skulls by Doctor Charles W. M. Poynter, professor of anatomy of the University of Nebraska. She was told nothing about the origin of the skulls. She worked faithfully for months, and, with the aid of the table of measurements, built up the three wonderful faces. It was not until she had nearly finished that she discovered one of the three to be a modern Indian type. Yet, without knowing she was working on a modern Indian skull, by applying only her[Pg 64] table of measurements faithfully to the skull as she built the clay upon it, she produced so characteristic an American Indian type that Doctor Poynter declared the accuracy of her work on the other two skulls, equally unknown to her, could by no means be called into question.
The cannibal cave-dweller type is that of which Mr. Gilder found remains in sunken cave homes along the Missouri River. He has uncovered some forty of these caves, and has established the fact that the inhabitants belong to what is known as the “round-headed” branch of the human race. Geologists believe the inhabitants of these caves thrived some three thousand years ago.
But the chief interest in the reconstruction work at the University of Nebraska attaches to the face that has been built over the skull of the Loess man. In all, the fragments of but six skulls belonging to this type are in existence to-day.
This extreme primitive type of man is believed to have stalked over the wastes of North America before the glaciers plowed their great gorges and before they deposited the Kansan drift and the Loess clay to build the bluffs at the Missouri River. This man, low-browed and of little brain capacity, lived contemporaneously with the mammoth or mastodon, which he probably slew for food, if indeed he could wield a stone weapon sharp enough and strong enough to pierce the thick hide.
And yet, now that the faces have been reconstructed, we find no close resemblance to the ape type, as many of the most excitable scientists have expected. “The truth is,” says Doctor Poynter, “if man sprang from the same original stem as the ape, the ape branch sprang off so far back in antiquity that none of the skulls of the missing links could possibly be expected to withstand the weathering to the present day. No one will ever find a skull that will carry man back even anywhere near the ape days, and the remotest skull we can find is already very much a man’s.”
This Loess man then belongs to an age perhaps hundreds of thousands of years later than the time man and ape parted company and began to develop along different lines.
Yet this Loess skull has, by competent geologists and ethnologists been placed next in age to the famous Neanderthal skull found in 1856 in a cave in the valley of Neander near Dusseldorf, Germany. The Neanderthal skull is known the world over as representing the great antiquity and low order of the human race. In brain capacity the Loess skull boasts little, if any, advantage over the Neanderthal.