I. The name of this race is that of the village near which the first human fossil was found. In 1700, Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Wurtemberg excavated a Roman oppidum in the neighbourhood of Stuttgard. A portion of the cranial vault of a man was discovered in the midst of a number of animal bones. Geology and palæontology were, however, still in their infancy; and the nature of this precious fragment was unknown till Jaeger, in 1835, recognised its value as an argument in favour of the coexistence of man with the great extinct mammals. After close study, thanks to the kindness of M. Fraas, M. Hamy and I have been able, without any difficulty, to connect it with the famous Neanderthal skull.
II. The latter was discovered in 1857 in a small cavern near Düsseldorf. The skeleton was perfect. Unfortunately, the workmen who discovered it, broke and dispersed the bones, of which part only were saved by Dr. Fuhlrott. When exhibited the same year at the Congress of Bonn, they became the subject of long-continued study and discussion. M. Schaaffhausen, although himself sometimes going beyond the truth, took his position from the first upon the right ground. Some anatomists wished, however, to consider this specimen as a specialspecies, and even a freshgenus. It was especially considered as intermediate between man and apes, and here and there traces may still be found of these opinions.
The only cause of these exaggerations is a feature, striking it is true, which is presented by this cranial vault. In the Neanderthal man the frontal sinuses have an exceptionaldevelopment, and the superciliary ridges, almost lost in the middle of the glabella, form a most strange protuberance above the orbit. This conformation has not failed to be compared to thebony ridgeswhich the anthropomorphous apes possess in the same place. Then, starting from this fact, it has been thought necessary to find in the rest of the cranium characters in harmony with thissimian feature. Stress has been laid upon its slight elevation, the lengthened form, the projection of the occipital region, etc.
With a little partiality, and by only comparing it with modern skulls, which are considered as normal, a separate species of being has been made of the Neanderthal man. By degrees, however, other crania equally fossil have been connected with this type. Indeed, in several parts of Europe those characters which were too hastily declared to be unique have been observed in dolmens in less ancient burial places, in historical persons, and even in individuals living at the present time. There was, then, no alternative but to conclude that the Neanderthal man belonged to a formation which was unquestionably human, to arace, certain features of which were merely exaggerated in his case.
This race is none the less remarkable and perfectly characterized. In all individuals of the male sex we find a greater or less development of the superciliary prominences, which were so striking in the Neanderthal man. The low and narrow forehead appears still more receding in consequence of this contrast. The cranial vault is much flattened. Tolerably regular in its two anterior thirds, it rises towards the upper portion of the occiput, and is prolonged backwards. The entire skull is relatively narrow, and we have already seen that the cephalic index descends as low as 72. These bones are also remarkable for their thickness, which in the Eguisheim cranium reaches 11 millimetres (0·43 in.). Some of these features are modified in the female skull. The superciliary ridges disappear almost entirely. The occipital protuberance, and especially the prominence of its upper portion, are much less marked. The cephalic indexrises one or two units, but the flattening of the vault and the other characters are persistent.
The Neanderthal cranium, and all those which may also be connected with the Canstadt type, are incomplete and without the face. One skull alone, the age of which unfortunately is not determined with certainty, enables us to fill up this gap. It is that from Forbes Quarry near Gibraltar. In this case the cranium, and particularly the forehead, exactly coincide with the description given above of the Neanderthal cranium. Immense and almost circular orbits, the index of which rises almost to 68·83, well agree with the vestiges in the Neanderthal cranium, and hide by their external border the temporal region. Below, the malar bones descend almost vertically; the nasal bones are prominent; the nasal orifices very broad. The superior maxillary bone is sensibly prognathous, and lastly the dental arch is of a horse-shoe shape narrowing backwards. The whole is rude and massive. A face recently discovered by M. Piette in the Gourdan grotto, and which will shortly be described by M. Hamy, confirms the connection which we have established between the Forbes Quarry skull and the remains of the Canstadt race. Found in the inferior beds of the cave, among flints of the Moustier type, this specimen reproduces with some modifications the characters which we have just described. The inferior maxillary bone recalls that of Arcy.
If these characters are united to those presented by the celebrated maxillary bone of Naulette, we must add that the chin in the Canstadt man is but slightly prominent, and that the lower part of the face was sometimes more peculiar, in this respect, than the greater number of the skulls of Negroes from Guinea. The researches of M. Hamy have, however, shown that the singular maxillary bone discovered by M. Dupont, was again only the exaggerated realization of a type which is met with elsewhere under considerable modifications.
In short, the cranium and face of the Canstadt man must, as a rule, have presented a strangely savage aspect.
The body appears to have harmonised with the head. The few bones of the limbs, preserved more or less intact, indicate a stature of only 1m.68 to 1m.72 (5ft. 6in., to 5ft. 8in.); yet their proportions are athletic. They are very thick relatively to their length, and the protuberances and depressions serving for muscular attachments are remarkably developed. Moreover, the tibia discovered in a quarry at Clichy by M. Bertrand, presented the flattened form which has been designatedplatycnemic, and the ribs of the Neanderthal skeleton were sensibly more rounded than is generally the case.
III. As far as we know at present, the Canstadt race is undoubtedly the most ancient European one. It disputed the ground with the great extinct mammals, with the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave bear, and the cave hyæna. It belongs, therefore, to the earliest ages of the quaternary epoch. In the opinion of M. Schaaffhausen, it may be traced to an earlier period still, and is identical with tertiary man surviving the latest geological revolution.
The naturalist who has made us so well acquainted with the Neanderthal man, only invokes, in support of his opinion, what he calls thetypical inferiorityof this man, and of those who are connected with him. This reason would to many be an insufficient motive for the view which he has taken. But I have observed above, that we are justified in assuming that man followed into Europe the great mammals which were driven by the cold into more southern countries. There can, then, be nothing strange in the idea that the race, to which everything points as having been the most ancient upon our soil, should also have been the one to accomplish the migration. But were the Saint-Prest, the Monte Aperto, and especially the Thénay men only its pioneers? The future alone can answer this question either in the affirmative or negative.
However this may be, the remains of human industry indicate a well-marked progress since the earliest ages. Tools and arms became more numerous and perfect. Deer’santlers and bear’s jaw-bones are worked into weapons and tools; in addition to scrapers and borers, the form of which becomes more and more marked, we find knives, chisels, and hammers, set in handles: hatchets of much greater size, sometimes comparatively thin, flat upon one side but retouched upon the other, sometimes thick and rudely cut on both sides, with or without a handle, belong to themoustierienandacheuléentypes of M. de Mortillet; they assume definite forms by which we are able to recognise several modifications characteristic of certain localities; the arrow is larger and the lance has become a formidable weapon. In the midst of the lowest quaternary alluvial deposits, we meet with small heaps ofcoscinopora globularis, and other small chalk fossils, all pierced either naturally or artificially. The only possible explanation is to consider these polypi and shells as having once formed necklaces or bracelets, the thread of which has disappeared. Thus, the taste for adornment, so largely developed in modern savages, was displayed as early as this period.
If we compare the industries, still very modest, with those of the present day, we shall be able to form for ourselves an approximate idea of what the race of Canstadt was when it occupied perhaps nearly the whole of Europe. With M. Lartet we see in the obsidian lances of New Caledonia, the flint heads of the lower alluvium of the Somme; the hatchet of certain Australians reminds us, as it did Sir Charles Lyell, of the Abbeville hatchet. It is with the latter and with the Bosjesmans, that I should be tempted to connect the Neanderthal man and his fellows. Like them, he seems to have most frequently led a wandering life. But few of his dwellings, or places of meeting, are known to us, such as the Naulette cavern. Nothing seems to indicate that he had places of burial such as we find later. Everything tends to show, moreover, that he lived entirely as a hunter, and there is nothing to justify us in supposing that he was acquainted with agriculture, which is carried to such a remarkable pitch by certain Melanesian negroes.
IV. Judging from the geological distribution of the remains which have been met with up to the present time, the Canstadt race during the quaternary period principally occupied the basins of the Seine and the Rhine, and extended perhaps as far as Stängenäs in the Bohuslän; certainly as far as the Olmo in central Italy; as Brux in Bohemia; as the Pyrenees in France, and probably as far as Gibraltar.
This race is not restricted in point of geological time. The attention roused by the strange characters of the Neanderthal cranium was the means of instituting widespread investigations, which have rapidly drawn this specimen from the isolation in which, at first, it seemed to be placed. B. Davis, Busk, Turner, King, Carter Blake, Pruner Bey, Vogt, Huxley and Hamy have been particularly successful in these investigations, and have brought to light relations which are now generally adopted.
The result obtained from all these labours is that the Canstadt type, sometimes remarkably pure, and sometimes again more or less modified by crossings, is found in the dolmens and in the cemeteries of the Gallo-Roman period, in those of the Middle Ages, and in modern tombs from Scandinavia to Spain, from Portugal to Italy, and from Scotland and Ireland to the valley of the Danube, in the Crimea at Minsk, and as far as Orenbourg in Russia. This area of habitation comprises, we see, the entire space of time which has elapsed from the quaternary period to the present day, and the whole of Europe.
The remark has with justice been made by M. Hamy, that there probably exist in India, in the midst of populations driven back by the Aryan invasion, representatives of the Neanderthal type. Nevertheless, to find them with any degree of certainty, we must go as far as Australia. Our investigations have on this point confirmed those of Huxley. Among the races of this great island there is one, distributed particularly in the province of Victoria, in the neighbourhood of Port Western, which reproduces in a remarkable manner the characters of the Canstadt race.
Finally, the Canstadt race has had representatives in America also. One of the drawings published by MM. Lacerta and Peixoto leaves no room for doubt on this point. It represents almost the whole of the upper part of a cranial vault found in the province of Ceara, the resemblance of which with that of Eguisheim is very striking. Unfortunately, the Brazilian naturalists say nothing about the situation of this precious fragment at the moment of its discovery, and we do not know whether the cranium in question is a fossil or whether it belongs to the present epoch.
V. All these facts, which I have been obliged to sum up in a few lines, raise an important problem, and lead to an interesting conclusion.
Are we, in the first place, justified in connecting ethnologically the crania of a more or less Neanderthal type, discovered in the Antipodes as well as in Europe, with the races, the remains of which have been preserved by the quaternary alluvium? Is not the reproduction of this type purely accidental? Do not the most ancient crania owe their remarkable characters to some pathological condition, to a simple deviation from the normal development, and particularly to a premature union of the bones of the cranium?
These several opinions have been maintained, and the latter in particular has had adherents. It rests principally upon the condition of the ossified sutures of the Neanderthal cranium. But these same sutures may be observed in the Canstadt cranium. M. Sauvage found in the almost infantine frontal bone of La Denise all the Neanderthal characters, although the medio-frontal suture as yet only existed in part. It is entirely open in the cranium of the young man, discovered in a Poitou tumulus, described by M. Pruner Bey, and which it is impossible not to connect with the preceding.
Thus we cannot attribute to the premature ossification of the sutures, the form of the crania of the men of Canstadt. For a much stronger reason, the clearly marked charactersof the forehead and face which remain cannot support this theory, and we must allow that the whole constitutes a true ethnical type.
Since we meet with this type disseminated through time and space, always fundamentally the same, and sometimes reappearing in all its primitive purity, we are forced to choose between the two following interpretations; we have here either anexample of atavism, the importance of which is attested by its generality: or else the reproduction of these exceptional forms, in the midst ofthe most varied populationsand under themost different conditions of life, is due to merechance.
The laws which govern the formation and maintenance of animal and vegetable races, and from which man cannot escape, do not allow the admission of the latter conclusion. This is why M. Hamy and I have regarded the Canstadt race as one of the elements of modern populations. In Europe it has blended with succeeding races, but asserts its past existence by the marks which it impresses, even at the present day, upon some rare individuals. In Australia, perhaps, it has some direct descendants in the tribes of North Western.
VI. The epithetsbrutalandsimian, too often applied to the Neanderthal cranium, and to those which resemble it, the conjectures made with regard to the individual to whom they belonged, might lead us to think that a certain moral and intellectual inferiority was naturally connected with this form of cranium. It can easily be shown that this conclusion rests upon a most worthless foundation.
At the Paris Congress, M. Vogt quoted the example of one of his friends, Dr. Emmayer, whose cranium exactly recalls that of Neanderthal, and who is nevertheless a highly distinguished lunacy doctor. In passing through the Copenhagen Museum, I was struck by the Neanderthal characters presented by one of the crania in the collection; it proved to be that of Kay Lykke, a Danish gentleman, who played some part in the political affairs of the 17th century. M. Godronhas published the drawing of the skull of Saint Mansuy, Bishop of Toul in the 4th century, and this head even exaggerates some of the most striking features of the Neanderthal cranium. The forehead is still more receding, the vault more depressed, and the head so long that the cephalic index is 69·41. Lastly the skull of Bruce, the Scotch hero, is also a reproduction of the Canstadt type.
In presence of these facts, we must assuredly acknowledge that even the individual whose remains were found in the Neanderthal cave was capable of possessing all the moral and intellectual qualities compatible with his inferior social condition.