(A) A short account of the ‘La Quina’ skeleton has now appeared (in ‘L'Anthropologie,’ 1911, No. 6, p. 730).

The skull is of the form described so often above, as distinctive of the Neanderthaloid type, but the brow-ridges seem even more massive than in the other examples of that race. The cranial sutures are unclosed, so that the individual is shewn to be of mature age, or at any rate, not senile. The teeth are, however, much worn down. Nearly all the teeth have been preserved in situ, and they present certain features which have been observed in the teeth found in Jersey (S. Brélade's Cave).

The skeleton lay in a horizontal position, but no evidence of an interment has been adduced. The bones were less than a metre below the present surface, and in a fine mud-like deposit, apparently ancient, and of a river-bed type. Implements were also found, and are referred unhesitatingly to the same horizon as the bones. The Mousterian period is thus indicated, but no absolutely distinctive implements were found. The general stratigraphical conditions are considered to assign the deposit to the base of what is termed the ‘inferior Mousterian’ level.

(B) The ‘sub-boulder-clay’ skeleton, discovered near Ipswich in 1911, was in an extraordinarily contracted attitude. Many parts are absent or imperfect, owing to the solvent action of the surroundings, but what remains is sufficient to reveal several features of importance (cf. [fig. 29]).

Save in one respect, the skeleton is not essentially different from those of the existing representatives of humanity. The exception is provided by the shin-bone. That of the right limb has been preserved, and it presents an anomaly unique in degree, if not in kind, viz.: the substitution of a rounded for a sharp or keel-like edge to the front of the bone. It can hardly be other than an individual peculiarity, though the Spy tibia (No. 1) suggests (by its sectional contour) the same conformation.

So far as the skeleton is concerned, even having regard to the anomaly just mentioned, there is no good reason for assigning the Ipswich specimen to a separate racial type.

Its interest depends largely upon the circumstances of its surroundings. It was placed beneath about four feet of ‘boulder-clay,’ embedded partly in this and, to a much smaller extent, in the underlying middle-glacial sand which the bones just entered.

There is some evidence that the surface on which the bones lay was at one time exposed as an old ‘land-surface.’ A thin band of carbonised vegetable matter (not far beneath the bones) contains the remains of land plants. On this surface the individual whose remains have been preserved is supposed to have met with his end, and to have been overwhelmed in a sand drift. The latter it must be supposed was then removed, to be replaced by the boulder-clay.

Several alternatives to this rather problematical interpretation could be suggested. The most obvious of these is that we have to deal here with a neolithic interment, in a grave of which the floor just reached the middle-glacial sand of the locality. If we enquire what assumptions are requisite for the adoption of this particular alternative, we shall find, I think, that they are not very different in degree from those which are entailed by the supposition that the skeleton is really that of ‘sub-boulder-clay’ man.