nounced or exaggerated specimen of a general type existing at that time.
The facial bones are wanting in all these skulls, but a skull found in the Forbes quarry near Gibraltar, unfortunately of doubtful geological horizon, but with facial bones intact, coincides very closely in craniological characters with the Neanderthal skull. These facial bones are rude and massive, the upper jawbone (superior maxillary) being sensibly prognathic, the nasal bones prominent, and the nasal orifices very broad; the dental arch is of horseshoe-shape, narrowing backward.
A lower jawbone found by Dupont in the cave of Naulette in the valley of the Lesse, Belgium, has been regarded as possibly belonging to a man of the Neanderthal type. This jaw is remarkable for thickness; the molar teeth increase in size backward, the wisdom tooth being the largest; there is also an absence of the chin prominence.
In the year 1886 MM. Fraipont and Lohest, two thoroughly competent scientific men, discovered two skeletons of the Neanderthal type (a man and a woman) at the mouth of a cave in the commune of Spy, in the Belgian province of Namur.[1]
These men of Spy were found in the terrace in front of a limestone cave or grotto (as represented on the screen, Fig. 2, by a section through the deposit) at the point E, after cutting through the formation A, nine feet six inches (2·9 metres) thick, composed of rubble and brown clay, containing calcareous blocks of several cubic metres volume; B, a yellow argillaceous tufa, two feet seven inches (0·8 metre) thick, containing calcareous blocks and difficult to cut with a pick; C, about six inches (15 centimetres) thick, of strong red color, containing flint chippings, angular fragments of limestone, charcoal, and débris of mammoth tusks; D, also about six inches (0·15 metre) thick, a yellow calcareous clay passing into a tufa of same nature as B, at the base of which is a small vein of wood charcoal; F, brown clay, sometimes black, containing angular limestone pebbles and flint chippings, under which is the limestone in which the cave is formed, K.
There are no fossils in A, nor at the point where the opening is made were any found in B; but the bed B was found to be fossiliferous at other points, containing bones of mammoth and deer, and toward the upper part, in discontinuous layers, flint chippings. The zone C, above the human bones, is a hard breccia, resisting the blow of a hammer, and composed of fragments of mammoth ivory, flint chippings, angular calcareous pebbles, and pieces of wood charcoal. The continuity of this zone C, the fact
- ↑ Rech. ethnograph. sur des ossiments humaines, par Julien Fraipont et Max Lohest. Archives de Biologie, vii, 1886.
