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
With an average height of 6 feet 1-1/2 inches, these cave-dwellers may be
said to demonstrate one of the most striking traits of the Crô-Magnon
race. In the proportions of the limbs and in the great size of the upper
part of the chest these men are removed from the modern European type and
approach some of the African negroid types, although there is not the
least resemblance to the negro type in the skull or in the dentition. In
contrast with the Neanderthals are three characters of the limbs: the leg
was very long in comparison with the arm; they show a remarkable
lengthening of the forearm in proportion to the upper arm and a still more
remarkable lengthening of the lower leg or shin-bone in proportion to the
thigh-bone; the tibia has an index of 81-86 per cent as compared with the
femur, which is relatively greater than that of the average modern
European, with a tibiofemoral index of 79.7 per cent. This long shin-bone
indicates that these men were swift of foot, quite in keeping with their
undoubted nomadic habits and wide distribution. The flatness of the tibia,
which is strongly marked in 62 per cent of the skeletons, may well be due
to the habit of squatting while engaged in fashioning flints and in other
industrial occupations. The leg, long in comparison with the arm, and the
thigh-bone, strongly developed, are both characters of a hunting race. The
foot has a very protruding heel, but the sole and the toes are of
moderate length. The hip-girdle is of a type which has nothing negroid
about it, but is as fine as that of the most civilized whites; it is
marked by its strength, the augmentation of all the vertical and
transverse diameters, and the reduction of the anteroposterior diameters.
The shoulders are exceptionally broad. The fact that the arms are
relatively short as compared with the legs is also a high racial
character. The upper arm is very robust, and in some cases the left arm is
more largely developed, in others the right.
In all the skulls from these grottos near Mentone, the face shows the
essential features of the Crô-Magnon race, its breadth being due to the
development of the cheek-bones and the zygomatic arches, for the upper
jaws are narrow, and the nose is thin or leptorhine. At the root the nose
shows a marked depression, but it rises immediately to a considerable
prominence; it thus undoubtedly had an aquiline profile. The orbits always
present the form of a long rectangle, so characteristic of the race along
the Vézère. All these characters leave no doubt of the racial affinity of
the skeletons from the Grottes de Grimaldi with the original Crô-Magnon
type. It must be concluded, therefore, that certain peculiar features
noted in the type of the 'old man of Crô-Magnon' are purely individual,
and that we are not justified in assuming the admixture of a foreign
element to account for the weakness of some characteristics which we
notice in the majority of the Crô-Magnon subjects from the caves of
Grimaldi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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