Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and ArtOsborn, Henry Fairfield
History
Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art
Osborn, Henry Fairfield
Art, Primitive; Prehistoric peoples; Stone age
Before looking at Neanderthal man as a whole, we may turn our attention
especially to a number of these peculiar features of the race. All the
earliest observers were impressed by the heavy, overhanging brows and
retreating forehead. In recent man there is often a decided prominence
above the eyes, from the glabella or median point above the nose outward
toward each side, but generally the outer third of the margin of these
prominences turns upward beneath the outer line of the eyebrows. In the
Neanderthals, on the contrary, these prominences beneath the eyebrows
surround the whole upper edge of the eye socket, extending outward around
the external borders of the forehead, so that they may be called '_tori
supraorbitales_'; the extent of this prominent ridge above and to the
sides forms a veritable roof over the eye sockets, which appear like two
deep, lateral caverns. Such lateral prominences do occur, though rarely,
in recent man; they are observed, for example, in certain Australians.
[Illustration: FIG. 113. Skulls of a chimpanzee (left), of La
Chapelle-aux-Saints (centre), and of a modern Frenchman (right), showing
the gradual disappearance of the eyebrow ridges and projecting face. After
Boule.]
The front view of the Neanderthal face, as seen in the female Gibraltar
skull, in which these eyebrow ridges are by no means so prominent as in
the male skulls, is no less remarkable for the great height of the face as
compared with the flatness of the forehead. Placing the skull side by side
with that of the Australian,(50) we observe at once the enormous
difference in the proportions of the face and the cranium in these two
types, although the Australian represents one of the lowest existing races
of _Homo sapiens_; we observe in the Gibraltar skull the very wide space
between the eyes and the very large size of the narial opening, which
indicate a broad, flattened nose; there is a correspondingly long space
between the bottom of the narial opening and the line for the insertion of
the incisor teeth, indicating a very long upper lip.
The jaw is less powerful than that of the Heidelberg man. The Heidelberg
jaw we have seen to be distinguished by its general strength and
clumsiness and its lack of chin, or rather a chin without the slightest
indication of a prominence; on the inside of this very thick, rounded chin
plate, the characteristic chin spine (_spina mentalis_) is lacking;
instead, a double groove is present as the point of attachment for the
muscles which connect the chin and tongue with the hyoid bone; the
ascending process for the attachment of the muscles of the jaw is seen to
be unusually broad, 60 mm., in contrast to about 37 mm. in the recent jaw;
finally, the condyle for attachment with the skull is particularly
large.(51)
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