THE SKULL OF CANNSTATT.
The derivation of the "skull of Cannstatt" (near Stuttgart) is wholly obscure. In 1700 Duke Eberhard-Louis of Wurtemberg caused explorations to be made in an oppidum near Cannstatt, which resulted in the discovery of many objects of Roman origin. At the base of the deposits were encountered bones of quaternary mammals, particularly Ursus spelæus, Elephas primigenius, and Hyæna spelæa. These bones were transported to the Cabinet of Natural History at Stuttgart, where they excited the highest interest and became the object of a series of publications. Dr. Solomon Ressel, aulic physician and a good osteologist, wrote the first report of the explorations (published in the year of the discovery), and in this he insists on the complete absence of the remains of man, which he searched for with care. The second scientific man who speaks of the Cannstatt finds. Doctor Spleissius, declares equally that no human bone has been recovered. Nor are later reports from the eighteenth century any less negative on this point. Finally, another court physician, Albert Gessner, affirms twice, in 1749 and 1753, that the Cannstatt excavations yielded no remains of man.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Cuvier already knew of a human lower jaw. But he writes in 1812:
It is known that the ground was handled without precaution and that there is no knowledge as to the level at which each object was discovered.
It is not until 1835, hence one hundred and thirty-five years after the explorations, that the paleontologist F. Jaeger declares that in one of the glass cases of the Stuttgart Museum he came across a portion of a human skull lying next to some Roman vases gathered in 1700. Without describing the skull, he speaks of it, on the mere evidence of this relation with objects of other class, as having been found in the Cannstatt excavations made under the orders of the Duke Eberhard-Louis.
To the earlier reports on the subject should be added the conclusion of de Hoelder, who is absolutely certain that the skull was not found during the explorations of 1700. No one knows where it comes from, or when it was placed in the case. It may not be without interest to state here that later there was found at Cannstatt, in the vicinity of Uffkirche and near the locality where the excavations were carried on in 1700, a Roman cemetery from the early part of the middle ages, while in 1816 there was unearthed in the same neighborhood a tomb with a collective neolithic burial. This tomb was in the tufa and was decorated with fossil tusks of the mammoth. It is easy to see that one may attribute to the skull posing as that of Cannstatt almost any origin he desires.
