The front view (Fig. 24, B) shows that the roof of the skull was very
regularly and elegantly arched in the transverse direction, and that the
transverse diameter was a little less below the parietal protuberances,
than above them. The forehead cannot be called narrow in relation to the
rest of the skull, nor can it be called a retreating forehead; on the
contrary, the antero-posterior contour of the skull is well arched, so
that the distance along that contour, from the nasal depression to the
occipital protuberance, measures about 13.75 inches. The transverse arc
of the skull, measured from one auditory foramen to the other, across
the middle of the sagittal suture, is about 13 inches. The sagittal
suture itself is 5.5 inches long.
The supraciliary prominences or brow-ridges (on each side of 'a', Fig.
23) are well, but not excessively, developed, and are separated by a
median depression. Their principal elevation is disposed so obliquely
that I judge them to be due to large frontal sinuses.
If a line joining the glabella and the occipital protuberance ('a', 'b',
Fig. 23) be made horizontal, no part of the occipital region projects
more than 1/10th of an inch behind the posterior extremity of that line,
and the upper edge of the auditory foramen ('c') is almost in contact
with a line drawn parallel with this upon the outer surface of the
skull.
A transverse line drawn from one auditory foramen to the other
traverses, as usual, the forepart of the occipital foramen. The capacity
of the interior of this fragmentary skull has not been ascertained.
The history of the Human remains from the cavern in the Neanderthal may
best be given in the words of their original describer, Dr Schaaffhausen
[4], as translated by Mr. Busk.
"In the early part of the year 1857, a human skeleton was discovered in
a limestone cave in the Neanderthal, near Hochdal, between Dusseldorf
and Elberfeld. Of this, however, I was unable to procure more than a
plaster cast of the cranium, taken at Elberfeld, from which I drew up
an account of its remarkable conformation, which was, in the first
instance, read on the 4th of February, 1857, at the meeting of the Lower
Rhine Medical and Natural History Society, at Bonn. [5]
Subsequently Dr. Fuhlrott, to whom science is indebted for the
preservation of these bones, which were not at first regarded as human,
and into whose possession they afterwards came, brought the cranium from
Elberfeld to Bonn, and entrusted it to me for more accurate anatomical
examination. At the General Meeting of the Natural History Society of
Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia, at Bonn, on the 2nd of June, 1857,
[6] Dr Fuhlrott himself gave a full account of the locality, and of the
circumstances under which the discovery was made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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