thal and Spy type.[1] The fact that this resemblance exists is of none the less importance because the proper interpretation of it is not yet clear. It may be taken to be a pretty sure indication of the physiological continuity of the blond long-heads with the Pleistocene Neanderthaloid men. But this continuity may have been brought about in two ways. The blond long-heads may exhibit one of the lines of evolution of the men of the Neanderthaloid type. Or, the Frisians may be the result of the admixture of the blond long-heads with Neanderthaloid men, whose remains have been found at Canstatt and at Gibraltar, as well as at Spy and in the valley of the Neander; and who therefore seem, at one time, to have occupied a considerable area in western Europe. The same alternatives present themselves when Neanderthaloid characters appear in skulls of other races. If these characters belong to a stage in the development of the human species, antecedent to the differentiation of any of the existing races, we may expect to find them in the lowest of these races, all over the world, and in the early stages of all races. I have already referred to the remarkable similarity of the skulls of certain tribes of native Australians to the Neanderthal skull; and I may add that the wide differences in height between the skulls of different tribes of Australians afford a parallel to the differences in altitude between the skulls of the men of Spy and those of the grave-rows of north Germany. Neanderthaloid features are to be met with, not only in ancient long skulls; those of the ancient broad-headed people entombed at Borreby in Denmark have been often noted.
Reckoned by centuries, the remoteness of the Quaternary or Pleistocene age from our own is immense, and it is difficult to form an adequate notion of its duration. Undoubtedly there is an abysmal difference between the Neandert haloid race and the comely living specimens of the blond long-heads with whom we are familiar, But the abyss of time between the period at which north Europe was first covered with ice, when savages pursued mammoths and scratched their portraits with sharp stones in central France, and the present day, ever widens as we learn more about the events which bridge it. And, if the differences between the Neanderthaloid men and ourselves could be divided into as many parts as that time contains centuries, the progress from part to part would probably be almost imperceptible. Nineteenth Century.
[Concluded.]
- ↑ Virchow, Beiträge zur physischen Anthropologic der Deutschen (Abh. der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenscbaften zu Berlin, 1876). See particularly p. 238 for the full recognition of the Neanderthaloid characters of Frisian skulls and of the ethnological significance of the similarity.
