1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Spy (Belgium)

SPY, a commune near Namur, Belgium. Here in 1886, in Betche aux Roches cavern, Maximin Lohest and Marcel de Puydt found two nearly perfect skeletons (man and woman) at the depth of 16 ft., with numerous implements of the Mousterian type. All the human remains are now in the Lohest Collection, Liége. The skulls were characterized by enormous brows, retreating forehead, massive jaw-bones, rudimentary chin and large posterior molars. The skeletons were further marked by a divergent curvature of the bones of the fore-arm; the tibia were shorter than in any other known race, and stouter than in most; the tibia and femur, being so articulated that to maintain equilibrium the head and body must have been thrown forward, as in the gait of the larger apes. These characteristics justify placing “ the man of Spy in the lowest category . . . the dentition is inferior to that of the neolithic man in France . . . approximates near to the apes, although there is still, to use the language of Fraipont and Lohest, an abyss between the man of Spy and the highest ape ” (E. D. Cope, “ The Genealogy of Man ” in The American Naturalist, April 1893, p. 334). With the skeletons were found bones of extinct mammals, the woolly rhinoceros (Rhinoceros tichorhinus), mammoth (Elephas primo-genius), and the cave-bear (Ursus spelaeus).

See also L'Homme contemporain du mammouth à Spy (Namur, 1887); G. de Mortillet, Le Préhistorique (1900).