A certain number of human skulls and a few complete skeletons have been found in the cave-deposits, and even in open ground (as at Predmost, in Moravia) associated with the bones of extinct animals, or with carvings and ornaments like those which occur abundantly in the caverns. The ancient cave-men of the Cromagnard type—often called “the Reindeer Men”—buried their dead sometimes in the caves, but more usually in the open. Sometimes the skeletons are found in a crouching position, as though tied up when buried; more rarely (as in some examples found in the caves at Mentone) they are stretched out and decorated with a necklace or wreath made of shells, or of the teeth or small bones of animals. In many cases the flesh was removed from the corpse, and red ochre was smeared on the bones (as by some recent savages). The “Reindeer” people used red ochre and charcoal to colour the engravings of animals (Fig. 71) which they made on the walls of their caves, and probably for painting or tattooing their own faces. The existence of these wall paintings, wonderful representations of bison, great ox, deer, and other animals, proves that these men had artificial light (lamps or torches) to send fitful gleams on to the paintings, and it is probable that the “wall pictures” had to do with some kind of witchcraft. Stone lamps have actually been discovered in the caves. Their ceremonial treatment of the dead shows that already the lines were laid for that worship of the “spirits of the departed,” which became general, and is especially familiar to us in the comparatively modern civilisation of Rome and the Etruscans. There is also evidence that they made simple musical instruments.

In the cave-deposits of the Post-Glacial or Reindeer Age, the human skulls and skeletons which have been found (not indicating more than thirty or forty individuals altogether from widely separate localities) show a very well-developed race, with large brain-case (Fig. 75), quite equal to that of modern Europeans. Some of these men were very tall, one of the skeletons from the Mentone caves being that of a man 6 ft. 3½ in. in height. The cavity of the skull (which corresponds very closely in size with that of the brain which it contained) would hold about 1550 units of water (the unit referred to is a cubic centimetre, 1550 of which are equal to a little less than two and a half English pints). It is not surprising that these Reindeer Men had fine brains, for their carvings and pictures show them to have been real artists, not mere savage scrawlers. This race is called the “Cromagnards,” after the first skulls discovered at Cromagnon, in Central France. They had big, strong lower jaws, with prominent chins, like many fine modern races (e.g. the New Zealanders), and fine, narrow noses. The face and upper jaws were somewhat prominent, though not nearly so much so as in modern negroes. The skull-bones were thick and strong. The brain-case or cranial part of the skull was oblong rather than round.

The skulls of the older race—that of the Last Glacial or Moustierian Age—the Neander Men, were long skulls, too, but had a peculiarly flattened shape and a retreating forehead. The bony ridges over the eyes, corresponding to the eyebrows, were enormous, and projected forwards like the vizor of a cap (Figs. 65, 76, and 77). There are but few specimens to guide our conclusions, but they show that though of short stature (some not more than 5 ft. 4 in.), these people were very muscular. The top of a skull from the cave in the Neander Valley, known as the Neanderthal skull, two imperfect skulls from the cave of Spy, in Belgium, an imperfect skull from Brunn, in Moravia, and other fragments from Krapina, in Croatia, and, lastly, one from a cave in Gibraltar, are the best known. Others, including fragments of several skeletons less fully described, which have been found at Predmost, in Moravia, probably belong to this race. But the newly obtained skull and bones from the centre of France (Chapelle-aux-Saints) are the most important of all yet discovered. They all date from the middle Pleistocene period, the age of the last great glaciers, earlier than the age of the Reindeer. The Gibraltar skull (Fig. 77) we have all known for a long time; it has been in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons for forty years, and two years ago was very carefully examined and figured by Professor Sollas, of Oxford. It is a specially valuable specimen, because it shows the bones of the face as well as the brain-case. From other specimens we know the lower jaw. The lower jaw was deep and powerful, but, like that of an ape, had a receding chin, or rather, we should say, had no “chin-prominence” at all (compare Figs. 79, 80, 81, and 82). The new French specimen (Fig. 65) is strongly prognathous. The orbits are enormous, and the nose very flat and quite unique in its great breadth. One of the two Neander-man skulls from the Belgian cave of Spy shows the face bones, and these agree with what has just been stated as to the French skull.

Hence it appears that a short race with a very strange and low-browed type of skull preceded the men of the Reindeer Age. When, thirty years ago, only the original skull-top from the Neander cave (Fig. 76) was known, Virchow, of Berlin, considered it to be probably that of an idiot, whilst Huxley expressed the opinion that it indicates a race of men with decidedly low development, and in some respects more ape-like characters than modern Europeans; but he held that it is not to be considered as “a missing link,” nor as taking us appreciably nearer from modern man to the apes, since it is most closely approached by the flat skulls, already well known, of some of the South Australian natives, both in shape and in the cubical capacity of the brain-cavity. What I mean by the flatness of the skull may be understood by looking at a side view of a monkey’s skull (Fig. 81) and of an ordinary European human skull (take the Cromagnon skull as equivalent, Fig. 75) placed upright, so that the eyes are looking forward. If in an outline or photograph of each of these skulls you draw a straight line from a point between the eyebrows back to a point just below the most projecting ridge of the hindermost region of the skull, you will find that above that line in the monkey’s skull is a slightly curved surface—the roof of the brain-case. But in the human skull above the similarly drawn line the roof bulges so as to form an almost hemispherical dome, rising sometimes vertically in the front region to form “the straight, high forehead” (which Shakespeare commended, even in woman). It swells out in the hinder region also. Now the Neander skulls, and to a less extent the skulls of many of the Australian aborigines, are more like the monkey’s in this matter; the dome of the roof is shallow and flat, and the forehead does not rise up, but slopes backwards, so that the whole contents of the brain-case are lessened by the reduction of the frontal and upper region. And there is reason to consider this frontal region of the brain as specially connected with some of the higher intellectual qualities of the mind.

We know a little more about the skull of the Neander race since Huxley wrote, owing to the further discovery of specimens. The Australian’s skull has usually a more projecting upper jaw and upper front teeth than has the Neander Man’s. The Neander skulls stand alone in the great breadth of the orbits and of the nasal region as compared with all known skulls. They are also alone (the Gibraltar skull and the new French specimen are the only ones which show it) in the contour of the upper jaw. In other human skulls there is a broad depression of the surface—a nipping-in, as it were—behind the root of the canine tooth on each side. This is absent in the Neander race; the bone here is flat, and not in-pushed. This absence of “modelling,” absence of the canine “fossa” or valley (as it is called), is seen in the larger apes as well as in the Neander Men. This point does not show in our figures. Some writers think it probable that the Neander Men of the late Glacial Age were the ancestors of the Cromagnards of the Reindeer Age, and also that the artistic Cromagnards were transformed, after many thousand years, into the comparatively dull and inartistic people of the Neolithic period. It seems to me, on the contrary, more probable (as is held by some of the French prehistorians) that the Reindeer Men died out, and were replaced by the Neolithic herdsmen who migrated into Western Europe as the climate became milder. The notion that the Esquimaux of to-day are the Reindeer Men of France who have migrated northwards with their reindeer, following the receding ice, has been entertained, but is regarded by the most careful inquirers as untenable. As to the earlier change of race, I hold that it is not possible to contend that the Neander Men developed into the Cromagnards of the Reindeer Age actually in the south of France. If the lower race or species gave rise to the higher, the enormous transformation did not occur here nor in Europe at all, nor during the later Pleistocene period. Human skulls of the Reindeer Age are known which present an approach to the characters of the Neander race, such as the heavy bony eyebrows. But it seems that this is accounted for by the survival of some Neander families alongside of the powerful Cromagnard men and the interbreeding of the two. The Cromagnards had probably lived with their reindeer in some more southern area during the late Glacial Age, and arrived in southern France as the climate improved and became suitable to their accustomed quarry. How and where they developed from a lower type of men we have at present no indication.

A very remarkable discovery of the last five years made in the course of the careful excavation of the four caverns of Mentone by the Prince of Monaco, where as many as sixteen human skeletons of the Pleistocene Age have been brought to light, gives us a new point of view as to the presence of more than one race in Europe in these immensely remote times, as in later periods. In one of the caves, and in a position showing them to date from the deepest layer of the middle Pleistocene, or late Glacial Age, two complete skeletons have been found (and may be seen alongside those of the Cromagnon race in the museum at Monaco), which are obviously different from those of both the Neander and the Cromagnon people. They have skulls which decidedly resemble that of the modern negro race, so that they have been definitely assigned to a new race hitherto unknown in European caves, and are spoken of as “the negroid skeletons” and “the Grimaldi race.” This is indeed a startling fact. There was land stretching across the Mediterranean in those days, and these skeletons suggest that already there was a negroid race in Africa, individuals of which had wandered north as far as the maritime Alps.[9] Two or three negroid skulls of Neolithic (therefore very much later) Age have been found in Brittany and in Switzerland. When we reflect that the negroid skeletons of Mentone and those of the contemporary Neander Men are probably more than 100,000 years old, we are at once impressed with the important conclusion that already in that remote period three great branches of the human race had come into existence—the negroid, the Neander, and probably, at a more distant spot, also the highly developed Cromagnards. The origin of the really primitive race of man is thrown back in time by these facts to a still more remote period, in fact, to an earlier geologic epoch. And it is to be noted over and above these facts that we have no indication as to where the much later race, the Neolithic Men, came from, nor who were their contemporaries outside the European area; nor again do we know where the historic races who succeeded the Neolithic Men took their origin. When other regions of the earth have been examined as carefully as Western Europe has been, we shall no longer be in such complete darkness.

When one ventures to speculate as to the story of the earliest men in Europe, one can but feel, even after handling the specimens and carefully following the excavations, how small and fragmentary and difficult to interpret is the evidence at present brought to light. And yet there the evidence is, gathered with the utmost care and intelligent method, discussed and interpreted by men of rare knowledge and experience, who, after long comparison of contending opinions and the discovery of an ever-increasing body of fact, have arrived at a definite certainty as to the sequence of arts, races, animals, and climates which I have given above, and is again summarised in the tabular statement on page 384 bis.

Hereafter these conclusions will be modified and extended by excavations in other parts of the world, at present untouched. The one point upon which the best authorities will not commit themselves is the exact, or even approximately exact, number of thousands of years which these events have occupied. The whole story, so far as it is at present worked out, is a marvellous result of patient research and scientific reasoning. Some of the cave collections upon which it is based are to be seen in London, in the British Museum.

There is one other discovery of a fossil man which comes properly at this point, to cap and confirm what has already been said. Fifteen years ago a skull-top and a thigh-bone were found by Dr. Dubois at Trinil, in the island of Java, at a depth of thirty feet in a sandy deposit, considered by good authority (but not certainly) to be of Pliocene age. From recent reports on the deposit it seems that it may very well be of Pleistocene age. These remains have become celebrated as those of a monkey-like man, and the name Pithecanthropus has been given to the creature to which they belonged. This skull-top (or cranial roof) is now in Utrecht, and is well known (Fig. 78). It indicates a race of men or men-like creatures, with the flatness of skull, receding forehead, and large bony eye-ridges, such as we see in the Neander Men and in some South Australians, but greatly exaggerated. The skull was so low and flat as greatly to resemble that of the Gibbon, though much larger. The volume of the cranial cavity (showing the size of the brain) was about 900 units—far smaller than that of the average Australian—the skull of smallest cavity among living races of men. The volume of the brain-cavity of the largest ape (gorilla) amounts to about 500 units (cubic centimetres); so that, allowing for rare individual fluctuations of as much as one-fourth more or one-fourth less (an amount of variation which, great as it is, is definitely known and recorded in specimens of the skulls of human races), we get the following list of “cranial capacities” or brain-sizes, forming a nearly unbroken series between the highest European and the ape. The middle figure represents the normal or average, and the first and last figure in each group the constant, though rare, minimum and maximum. Gorilla, 350, 500, 650; Java race, 675, 900, 1125; Australians, 900, 1200, 1500; Cromagnard and European, 1165, 1550, 1940 (European skulls of this great capacity are known). The Neander-man skulls are left out of the above list—although the CorrÈze specimen allows of a satisfactory measurement of its capacity—for a very curious reason, which is explained in the next chapter.

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