Heidelberg was not found with or near any stone tools. He seems to
belong to that part of the Pleistocene in which the Abbevillian tools
were made. Although he shares a few physical traits with Neanderthal
man, who lived much later and made excellent tools, some specialists
point out that the Heidelberg jaw bears an even closer resemblance to
the early man-apes of South Africa, who had no toolmaking tradition.
For the long, cool, and somewhat arid second interglacial period, we
have two good prospects, both probably females. One of these is from
Swanscombe. In 1936, A. T. Marston found there among the undisturbed
Middle Gravels a fragment of fossil skull. Except for its unusual
thickness, it was not unlike an equivalent portion in the skull of
modern man. Marston’s discovery was all the more exciting since this
fragment fitted very well with another, obviously from the same skull,
which he had found in place the previous year, only a few paces away.
The two pieces, from the left side and back of the skull, provided the
earliest undisputed evidence for a very early form of modern man. Twenty
years later, in 1955, Mr. J. Wymer recovered a third fragment, from the
right side of the same skull. The spots from which the three fragments
of the Swanscombe skull were recovered mark a triangle, the sides of
which measure 24, 49, and 51 feet. Near the Swanscombe bones and at the
same level were found more than two hundred stone flakes as well as four
small hand axes of Acheulean type, a stone knife, and fragments of other
tools. As we have mentioned, the gravels appear to be an undisturbed
deposit. Accordingly, they are now adequately protected and the object
of a most intensive and careful excavation. From them may come yet more
information about this ancient ancestor.[11]
This is early man, indeed. Swanscombe, from all the evidence now
available, is very close physically to modern man, closer than many
fossil men from the third interglacial period. And judging from the
accompanying stone tools, we may say that Swanscombe was culturally as
well as physically human.
Until additional remains of Swanscombe are recovered, we cannot with
certainty assign these remains to a precise place among man’s ancestors.
There are a few who suspect that the facial bones, should these be
recovered, would place Swanscombe closer to Neanderthal than to modern
man. However profitless such a conjecture may seem, it is at least
suggested by our third early European fossil, the Steinheim skull.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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