Fig. 65.—The human skull from the Chapelle-aux-Saints, now in the Museum of Natural History, Paris. One-third the size (linear) of nature. a-b is a line drawn from a point above the brow ridges (a) to a point on the exterior of the skull corresponding to the inner attachment of the membrane called the “tentorium” which separates the cerebrum above from the cerebellum beneath it. The part of the skull above this line (or rather the horizontal plane, the edge of which it represents) is the cranial dome, and is in this skull comparatively shallow. Compare it with the same line and the cranial dome in [Fig. 75] of a Reindeer Man, which agrees with a modern European skull in the greater height of the dome above the line a-b. The line drawn from the line a-b to the point e is the vertical line erected at the middle point of the line a-b. It gives the measure of the greatest height of the cranial dome. The line from f similarly falls on to the point half-way between the line e and the point b. It measures the height of the back part of the cranial dome. Compare these and the other lines in the other figures of human skulls and that of the chimpanzee ([Fig. 81]), which are all drawn to the same scale as this figure, namely, one-third the linear measurement. c is the point on the top of the skull known as the “bregma”; it is the point where the frontal bone meets the two parietal bones. The line c-a cuts off a curved area lying in front of it. This is “the frontal boss,” and the vertical line to d, drawn from its most prominent point to the line a-c, gives a very good measure of the amount of prominence and volume of the forehead. Compare this area and the line d in the other skulls figured, especially in the well-developed skull of the Reindeer Man ([Fig. 75]) and in the chimpanzee’s skull. The reader is referred also in regard to these measurements to my Kingdom of Man (Constable & Co.). Besides these lines of measurement, the reader should note the great brow ridges, the prominence of the whole face below the orbits (not merely of the teeth-sockets). [Fig. 65] gives the actual state of the skull. In [Fig. 80] the same skull is drawn as restored by Prof. Marcelin Boule.
[Transcriber’s Note: The original image is approximately 2½ inches (6.5cm) high and 5½ inches (14cm) wide in total.]
[XLI]
THE MOST ANCIENT MEN
In the winter of 1908-09 a very interesting discovery was announced in the daily newspapers—the discovery of a human skull and some bones buried in a cave called the Grotto of the Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the central department of France, known as the Corrèze, not very far from Perigueux, in the Dordogne. An account was given of this discovery by Professor Marcelin Boule, of the Paris Museum, to the Académie des Sciences, and the description of the bones, which had been carefully pieced together, and were exhibited to the meeting of the Academy, was sent by him to me (see [Fig. 65]). Some exaggerated statements as to the monkey-like character of the race to which these bones belonged (exaggerated, but not altogether devoid of truth) were circulated by imaginative correspondents in the newspapers. It is the fact that these human remains are of enormous antiquity, and belong to a very peculiar and primitive race known as the Neander Men, so called because a skull and some bones of this same race were found fifty years ago in a cave in the Neander valley,[7] near Elberfeld, on the Rhine.
The French archæologists, or “prehistorians,” as we now call them—are the leading discoverers in all that relates to very early man. The caves in Central and Southern France (Dordogne, Pyrenees, and Riviera) and the gravels in the north have furnished the most wonderful and interesting evidences of the existence of human beings at an immensely remote period in this part of Europe. Enthusiastic excavators and collectors of French nationality have discovered, preserved, and described the weapons, carvings, and drawings made by the old cave-dwellers of Southern France, buried by the accumulated deposits of ages deep in the caverns where the human artists who made these things used to live. In England only two such caves containing the implements of prehistoric men have been found—whilst a few are known in Belgium, Moravia, and Switzerland.
Although we know an immense number of the flint instruments, bone harpoons, and carvings and drawings of the ancient cave-dwellers, yet skulls and bones of the men themselves are extremely rare. Bones, skulls, and teeth of the animals they killed and ate are abundant in the caves—such as those of great bulls, deer, and horses. The bones also of animals which lived in these caves and contended with the ancient men for the possession of the shelter afforded by them, are abundant: bones of hyæna, of bear, of lion, and wolf. But human bones are exceedingly rare. This arises partly from the fact that human bones are not so thick and strong as those of large animals, and more easily soften, break up, and are lost. It is also due partly to the fact that the men were not nearly so numerous as the wild animals; but it is chiefly due to the fact that these people usually, but not always, buried their dead in the open; and whilst the bones of animals which had been eaten were left about in heaps on the floor of the caves, and became cemented together by the petrifying deposit caused by water dripping from the walls of these limestone caverns or by streams actually flooding the caverns, the bodies of the men themselves were removed when they died by their friends and families, and buried in the open ground, where they have gradually dissolved and broken up. Only a few here and there of the more ancient races were buried in a cave, and are in consequence preserved until the present day. Obviously, it would only be an exceptional honour or superstition which would cause the giving up of a cave to the interment of a dead body, or only rarely that a corpse could be tolerated in the floor of the cave still inhabited by living men.