Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/66

X The Neanderthaleb, and the Rhodesian Man A BOUT fifty or sixty thousand years ago, before the cHmax / of the Fourth Glacial Age, there lived a creature on Earth so -^ ^ like a man that until a few years ago its remains were con- sidered to be altogether human. We have slculls and bones of it and a great accumulation of the large implements it made and used. It made fires. It sheltered in caves from the cold. It probably dressed skins roughly and wore them. It was right-handed as men are. Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not true men. They were of a different species of the same genus. They had heavy protruding jaws and very low foreheads and great brow ridges above the eyes. Their thumbs were not opposable to the fingers as men's are ; their necks were so poised that they could not turn back their heads and look up to the sky. They probably slouched along, head down and forward. Their chinless jaw-bones resemble the Heidelberg jaw-bone and are markedly unUke human jaw-bones. And there were great differences from the human pattern in their teeth. Their cheek teeth were more complicated in structure than ours, more complicated and not less so, they had not the long fangs of our cheek teeth ; and also these quasi-men had not the naarked canines (dog teeth) of an ordinary human being. The capacity of their skulls was quite human, but the brain was bigger behind and lower in front than the hiunan brain. Their intellectual faculties were differently arranged. They were not ancestral to the human line. Mentally and physically they were upon a different line from the human line. Skulls and bones of this extinct species of man were found at Neanderthal among other places, and from that place these strange proto-men have been christened Neanderthal Men, or Neander- thalers. They must have endured in Europe for many hundreds or even thousands of years. 46