THE PROGRESSION OF LIFE ON EARTH
skull of an Australian native found in a river deposit at Talgai, in Queensland.
Another fossil human jaw, found in a sand pit at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany, is ape-like in the downward and backward slope of the bony chin. In other respects, however, it is typically human, though it is unusually thick and heavy. It is probably almost or quite as old as the Piltdown jaw, just mentioned. At the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, therefore, there existed in Europe more than one race of men that resembled apes in the peculiarities of their jaws.
Later deposits in Germany, Belgium, and France—even some so far away as Palestine—have yielded remains of men with a large brain case and typically human jaws, but with the bony forehead inflated into great brow ridges like those of a chimpanzee. These early men are known by almost complete skeletons, because they had learned to bury their dead, and several of their burial places in caves and rock-shelters have been discovered. They represent the Neanderthal or Mousterian man, so called because the first skeleton to attract attention was found in a cave in the Neanderthal near Düsseldorf and the stone tools which this kind of man made were first studied in the cave of Le Moustier, in the Dordogne. Neanderthal man walked with a shuffling gait, not quite upright, as proved by his gorilla-like neck and thigh bone. Indeed, he combined in one body more ape characters than are seen in any other low kind of Man.
The cave-floor deposits and others later than those containing Neanderthal man yield no remains of any but typical modern man, Homo sapiens. Some of these remains suggest that the human races of the northern hemisphere were at first less distinctly separated than they are at the present day; but the skeletons found are still too few to warrant definite conclusions. Fossil skulls from Wadjak, in Java, and from
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