The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 3

In 1928 parts of two lower jaws were found ; and in 1929 Mr. W. C. Pei of the Chinese Geological Survey found a brain-case, the only complete cranium known of a subman outside the genus Homo. Altogether, remains from at least ten individuals have been discovered up to the date of this printing. Like Piltdown man and the Java Ape Man, Sinanthropus dates back several hundred thousand years, to the early part of the Pleistocene period (V E). His jaws present many resemblances to that of Piltdown man. His skull, however, is closer to that of Pithecanthropus, but definitely more human, with higher vault and betterdeveloped forehead. But it was still a very lowly intelligence this skull contained.

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 5

was that he buried the bodies of his dead. Other species of bygone men, it seems, were left to moulder where they died, like animals; but the Neanderthalers laid out some at least of their dead in their caves and put tools and implements beside them and buried them, presumably because they did not believe life was wholly ended, and so put these things for the use of the departed if and when he or she awoke again. It is rash to guess too precisely what ideas led to these interments. They had ideas and doubts about death, no doubt, that resulted in burial. That is as much as we can say of creatures so remote from ourselves. The majority of Neanderthal skeletons so far discovered owe their preservation to this disposition.

In spite of this human habit of interment the Neanderthalers were distinctly less human than we ; they had heavy brow-ridges, no chin, large teeth —though their canines were less ape-like

_ than ours—head thrust forward on a thick neck, and their short, bent thighs compelled them to walk bandy-legged, with their weight on the outer side of their feet. Many of the implements ascribed to extinct human species are so big as to be unwieldy by the hands of any living race of men.

All these extinct human and subhuman forms are of Pleistocene Age (V E), save possibly for Piltdown man, who may (though it is unlikely) date back to the Pliocene (V D). Their

remains, until we come to the Neander-

Fig. 155. The huge, chinless jaw of Heidelberg Man thalers, are mostly found in gravels that drawn to scale with the jaw of a modern European. may have been disturbed and _ re-

(After Sir Arthur Keith, modified.)

The primary human things were absent from its life. Although hundreds of tons of the soil in which these remains were found have been sifted and examined, no stone tools have been discovered, nor any trace of fire observed.

Three other extinct types of men which, though admitted to the same genus as ourselves, clearly belong to different species, are Heidelberg man (Homo heidelbergensis), without a chin and with a jaw of extraordinary massiveness (Fig. 155), Rhodesian man (H. rhodesiensis), with brow-ridges heavier than in any existing human beings, and a brain that to-day would be definitely subnormal; and Neanderthal man (H. neanderthalensis). ‘This last is the only extinct species of man of whom as yet we possess abundant material. The reason for this

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deposited and so are exceptionally hard

to date. They are probably only a small fraction of the quasi-human species that still await discovery. Some that have existed may for ever escape record, for such intelligent creatures could have been rarely drowned or bogged or otherwise preserved for us.

Earlier, as far back as the Miocene Period (VC), there existed in Europe a creature christened Dryopithecus, which obviously is to be put in the same group with the living, man-like apes. But its teeth, though differing from our own in many ways, have a pattern which is more like that of the various extinct species of man than it is like that of modern apes.

Thus the fossil evidence, even though it be fragmentary, is uncompromisingly consistent with the idea that man also is a product of Evolution. Though the stem