Thus little or nothing is known of the first inhabitants of Celtic
lands, beyond their tools, but when we come to the middle palæolithic
period the case is different. While some difference of opinion still
exists, the view advanced by Obermaier[10] and others seems to be
gaining ground, that in Celtic lands the industry of Le Moustier
first appeared as the climate was becoming colder on the approach of
the last or Würm glaciation, though it is thought by some that it
had flourished in an earlier and warmer time in the regions lying
to the east.[11] This industry is believed by most authorities to
have survived the first Würm maximum and to have lasted through the
temporary amelioration of the Laufen retreat. Whether it survived, too,
the second maximum, and lasted until the climate definitely improved
is more doubtful, but many archæologists of great repute believe that
it did so,[12] and unless this was the case it will be difficult to
explain certain features of the Audi flints.[13]
Though there is as yet no general agreement as to the duration of the
Mousterian industry, it is different when we come to consider the type
of man who was responsible for this work. Everyone is agreed that
the authors of this culture were of the type known as Neanderthal
man, for several skeletons of this type, or parts of them, have been
found associated with flint implements of Le Moustier design, and none
have as yet turned up under conditions which make this correlation
impossible.[14]
A considerable number of skulls and skeletons, about two dozen in all,
of Neanderthal man have been found, the great majority in Celtic lands;
but, though there is a general resemblance between all the members of
the series, sufficiently strong to mark them off from the Piltdown
skull on the one hand and from modern men on the other, the type is
in many respects very variable. There are vast differences observable
between the skull from Chapelle-aux-Saints,[15] the highest form yet
discovered, and that of the Gibraltar man,[16] or rather woman, which
is the most primitive yet found in Europe. As far as one can judge from
the descriptions which have appeared as I write, the skull recently
found at Broken Hill in Rhodesia differs from that of Gibraltar hardly
if at all more than the Gibraltar skull differs from that found at
Chapelle-aux-Saints. In the latter case there are several intermediate
forms, in the former such may yet turn up, for Africa has, as yet,
produced but one other skull of this type, that found not long ago near
Constantine in Algeria, no description of which has, I believe, yet
been published.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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