Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French
cave site, Fontéchevade. They come from the time of the last great
interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the
Fontéchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the
forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not
heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to
an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if _her_)
brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Fontéchevade
fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for
Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.
It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in
Europe--before the classic neanderthaloids--who looked more modern,
in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our
best suggestion of what men looked like--just before they became fully
modern--comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.
THE FIRST MODERNS
Professor T. D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the
Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved
was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or
varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other
Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that
of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning
in the north--say 75,000 years ago.
The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul
(“cave of the kids”). The other group, from several caves, had bones of
men of the type we’ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted
were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each
of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other
scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul
group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time.
The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the
act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be
exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000
years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact
later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us
think, then they show how relatively modern some men were--men who
lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European
pocket.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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