Once suspected of being Middle Pleistocene at the earliest, the _Australopithecines_’ apparent lack of culture, their crude development, and relatively small brain capacity indicated to some authorities that they were too little and too late to have been ancestral to man. But given a greater time span-back, say, to the Late Pliocene—they could be regarded seriously as mans ancestors. Somewhat cautiously, Sir Wilfrid E. Le Gros Clark seems to agree with Dart that, as a whole, the _Australopithecines_ may well include the stock from which our own genus was derived.[17] Back of the _Australopithecines_ are yet other fossils of great interest, forms intermediate between man and apes in various ways. These all are utterly lacking in culture, in our sense of the word. One of the more interesting fossils is _Oreopithecus bambolii_, quantities of which have been recovered from a lignite mine at Baccinello, Italy.[18] These fossils seem to date from about the Early Pliocene. More than ape or monkey, their teeth are definitely manlike—hominid rather than merely hominoid—and the size of their brains is about that of the larger chimpanzees or the smaller _Australopithecines_. Future studies surely will indicate if, and perhaps how, _Oreopithecus_ is related to the South African man-apes, and to man. The Progressive Neanderthal Let us get back to Europe and the next culture in Mortillet’s scale. This is the Mousterian; we know it better by the name of the place in Germany—Neanderthal—where, in 1856, the first skeleton of the Mousterian Age was found. It took thirty years for this skeleton to win scientific recognition, but now we have about a hundred admitted specimens. The Neanderthal was not a pretty spectacle. He had the low forehead and heavy brow ridges of Java and Peking man, and the same lack of chin. And yet he was the cleverest fellow by far that had ever lived, and the most sensitive, which may seem rather odd, since some of the earlier skulls found in England, Africa, Java, and Australia come nearer the modern type of what we call thinking man, _Homo sapiens_. On the evidence we have, the Neanderthal seems to have been the inventor of religion. In his caves we find burials for the first time, and burials accompanied by tools for the dead man to use in the other world. We also find shrines made of the skulls of cave bears. As a chipper of flint, he was much more skillful than those that had gone before. He soon gave up making tools which, like the hand ax, would serve a number of purposes, but none very well. He invented the stone spear point. There is still considerable argument about his flint work, or at least about the technique which he may or may not have developed. [Illustration: THREE TYPES OF OLD WORLD MAN