No human bones have as yet been discovered in the deposit of the Somme
valley, where so many Palæolithic flints have been found; but in the
valley of the Seine, at Clichy, Messrs. Bertrand and Reboux found, in
1868, portions of human skeletons in the same beds where Palæolithic
implements had been embedded. These bones were found at a depth of
seventeen feet, and included a female skull of very inferior type,
having enormously thick frontal bone and a low, narrow roof, slanting
from before backwards. A very good specimen of human fossil is that
known as the “Denise Fossil Man,” comprising the remains of more
than one skeleton found in a volcanic breccia near Le Puy-en-Velay,
in Central France. These bones have been very carefully examined by
the members of the French Scientific Congress, as also the deposit
in which they were found, and the opinion arrived at is that the
fossils are genuine and their age early Pleistocene. Another most
interesting specimen of ancient human remains is the skeleton found
buried under four Cypress forests, superimposed one upon the other, in
the delta of the Mississippi, near New Orleans, at a depth of sixteen
feet. Dr. Dowler ascribes to this skeleton an antiquity of at least
50,000 years, reckoning by the minimum length of time that must have
elapsed during the formation of the deposits found and the sinking of
the four successive forest beds. In another part of the same delta,
near Natchez, a human bone, _os innominatum_, accompanied by bones
of the mastodon and megalonyx, was washed out of what is believed
to be a still more ancient alluvial deposit. Dr. Dickeson, in whose
possession the said bone is now, states that it was buried at a depth
of thirty feet, and geologists agree that its date is very early, some
maintaining that it is probably of a higher antiquity than any yet
discovered.
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