But to return to undoubted neolithic skulls, we have very clear evidence that the four distinct European races already existed. Thus in Britain we have two distinct forms of barrows or burial tombs, one long, the other round, and it has become proverbial that long skulls go with long barrows, and round skulls with round barrows. The long barrows are the oldest, and belong entirely to the stone age, no trace of metal, according to Canon Greenwell, having ever been found in them. The skulls and skeletons are those of a long-headed, short, and feeble race, who may be identified with the Iberians; while the round barrows contain bronze and finally iron, and the people buried in them were the tall, fair, round-headed Gauls or Celts of early history, or intermediate types between these and the older race. Later came in the tall, fair, and long-headed Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian races, so that we have three out of the four European types clearly defined in the British islands and traceable in their descendants of the present day. But when we attempt to go beyond the Iberians of the neolithic age in Britain, we are completely at fault. We have abundant remains of palæolithic implements, but scarcely a single undoubted specimen of a palæolithic skeleton, and it is impossible to say whether the men who feasted on the mammoth and rhinoceros in Kent's cavern, or who left their rude implements in the high-level gravel of the chalk downs, were tall or short, long-headed or round-headed. On the contrary, there seems a great hiatus between the neolithic and the palæolithic periods, and, as Geikie has shown, this appears to be the case not in England only but in a great part of Europe. It would almost seem as if the old era had disappeared with the last glacial period, and a completely new one had been introduced. But although the skulls and bones of palæolithic races are wanting in Britain and scarce everywhere, enough of them have been found in other European countries to enable anthropologists not merely to say that different races already existed at this immensely remote period, but to classify them by their types, and see how far these correspond with those of later times. This has been done especially in France and Belgium, where the discoveries of palæolithic skeletons and skulls have been far more frequent than elsewhere. Debierre in his L'Homme avant l'histoire, published in the Bibliothèque Scientifique of 1888, enumerates upwards of forty instances of such undoubted Quaternary human remains, of which at least twenty consisted of entire skulls, and others of jaws and other important bones connected with racial type.
The best and latest conclusions of modern anthropology from these remains will be found in this work of Debierre's, and in Hamy's Palæontologie humaine, Quatrefages' Races humaines, and Topinard's Anthropologie, and it will be sufficient to give a short summary of the results.
The history of Quaternary fossil man is divided, in the Crania Ethnica of Quatrefages and Hamy, into four races: 1st, the Canstadt race; 2nd, the Cro-Magnon race; 3rd, the races of Grenelle and Furfooz; 4th, the race of Truchere.
The Canstadt race, so called from the first skull of this type, which was discovered in the loess of the valley of the Rhone near Wurtemburg, though it is better known from the celebrated Neanderthal skull, which gave rise to so much discussion, and was pronounced by some that of an idiot, by others the most pithecoid specimen of a human skull yet known, in fact almost the long-sought-for missing link.
A still later discovery, however, has set at rest all doubt as to the reality of this Neanderthal type, and of its being the oldest Quaternary human type known in Western Europe. In the year 1886 two Belgian savants, Messrs. Fraissent and Lohest, one an anatomist, the other a geologist, discovered in a cave at Spy near Namur two skeletons with the skulls complete, which presented the Neanderthal type in an exaggerated form. They were found under circumstances which leave no doubt as to their belonging to the earliest Quaternary deposit, being at the bottom of the cave, in the lowest of three distinct strata, the two uppermost of which were full of the usual palæolithic implements of stone and bone, while the few found in the lowest stratum with the skeletons were of the rudest description. Huxley pronounces the evidence such as will bear the severest criticism, and he sums up the anatomical characters of the skeletons in the following terms—
"They were short of stature, but powerfully built, with strong, curiously curved thigh-bones, the lower ends of which are so fashioned that they must have walked with a bend at the knees. Their long depressed skulls had very strong brow-ridges, their lower jaws, of brutal depth and solidity, sloped away from the teeth downwards and backwards, in consequence of the absence of that especially characteristic feature of the higher type of man, the chin prominence."
M. Fraissent says, "We consider ourselves in a position to say that, having regard merely to the anatomical structure of the man of Spy, he possessed a greater number of pithecoid characters than any other race of mankind."
And again he says—
"The distance which separates the man of Spy from the modern anthropoid ape is undoubtedly enormous; but we must be permitted to point out that if the man of the Quaternary age is the stock whence existing races have sprung, he has travelled a very great way. From the data now obtained, it is permissible to believe that we shall be able to pursue the ancestral type of man and the anthropoid apes still further, perhaps as far as the Eocene and even beyond."
This Canstadt or Neanderthal type was widely diffused early in the Quaternary period, having been found in a skull from the breccia of Gibraltar, in skulls from Italy, Spain, Austria, Sweden, and in France, Belgium, and Western Germany; in fact almost everywhere where skulls and skeletons have been found in the oldest deposits of caves and river-beds, notably in the alluvia of the Seine valley near Paris, where three distinct superimposed strata are found, each with different human types, that of Canstadt being the oldest. Wherever explorations have been carefully made it seems to be certain that the oldest race of all in Europe was dolicocephalic, and probable that it was of the Canstadt type, the skulls of which are all low and long, the length being attained by a great development of the posterior part of the head, which compensates for a deficient forehead.