t is significant of
his primitive condition that these earliest relics indicate a man of a
very low grade of development, mentally far above the ape, it is true,
but mentally and physically much below modern man.

The most ape-like of those human remains is the famous Neanderthal
skull, found in 1856 in a limestone cavern of the Neanderthal Valley,
between Duesseldorf and Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia. The relics
discovered consist of the brain cap, two femori, two humeri, and other
fragments. The fragment of the skull attracted wide attention by its
bestial aspect, it presenting a low, narrow and receding forehead, and
an enormous thickness of the bony ridges over the eyes, like that seen
in the gorilla. This skull, which was associated with remains of the
cave-bear, hyena, and rhinoceros, is, with one exception, the most
ape-like human relic yet found. Yet its cranial capacity is far above
that of the highest apes, and is assimilated with that of Hottentot and
Polynesian skulls.

It has been maintained that this is a pathological specimen, and does
not represent normal man. But this theory has been disproved by the fact
that other skulls of similar cranial characters are now known,
indicating that the Neanderthal cranium represents a type of man, not an
abnormal individual. In the Spy Cavern, in the province of Namur,
Belgium, there were found, in 1886, two nearly perfect skeletons of a
man and a woman, both of them with very prominent eye ridges, low,
retreating foreheads, and large orbits. This was strikingly the case
with the woman. The lower jaws in both were heavy, while the woman was
almost destitute of a chin--a marked ape-like characteristic. The tibia
was shorter than in any known race and stouter than in most. Its curious
feature was the articulation with the femur, which was such that to
maintain the equilibrium the head and body must have been thrown
forward, as is the case in the anthropoid apes.

In the cave of Naulette, near Dinant, Belgium, has been found the lower
jaw of a man of decidedly ape-like aspect. Its prognathism or protrusion
is extreme, and the canine teeth were very strong, while the molars were
evidently large and increased in size backward, a non-human
characteristic. At La Denise, in the upper Loire, France, have been
found the frontal bones of a man like the Neanderthal man in type, the
forehead being depressed and retreating, and the superciliary ridges
large and thick. Several oth