Chapter 1633

[←1626]

We confess to not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. E. Clodd’s positive statement in Knowledge. Speaking of the men of Neolithic times, “concerning whom Mr. Grant Allen has given ... a vivid and accurate sketch,” and who are “the direct ancestors of peoples of whom remnants yet lurk in out-of-the-way corners of Europe, where they have been squeezed or stranded,” he adds, “but the men of Palæolithic times can be identified with no existing races; they were savages of a more degraded type than any extant; tall, yet barely erect, with short legs and twisted knees, with prognathous, that is, projecting ape-like jaws, and small brains. Whence they come we cannot tell, and their ’grave knoweth no man to this day.’ ”

Besides the possibility that there may be men who know whence they came and how they perished—it is not true to say that the Palæolithic men, or their fossils, are all found with “small brains.” The oldest skull of all those hitherto found, the “Neanderthal skull,” is of average capacity, and Mr. Huxley was compelled to confess that it was no real approximation whatever to that of the “missing link.” There are aboriginal tribes in India whose brains are far smaller and nearer to that of the ape than any hitherto found among the skulls of Palæolithic man.