Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/649

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
FOSSIL MAN.
633

four types. They are all short heads (brachycephali), the first Furfooz race having a cephalic index of 79·31; the second, 81·39; that of Grenelle, 83·53; that of La Touchère, 84·32. The La Touchère skull is remarkable for a disharmony the inverse of that of the Cro-Magnon. In this case the skull is broad and short while the face is long.

The two races of Furfooz have a family resemblance, but are distinctive types: in the first the head is harmonic, the forehead retreating, the face broad, a sufficiently prominent nose, square orbits, and an almost orthognathous superior maxillary; in the second Furfooz race the forehead rises somewhat perpendicularly, the orbits and the face are longer, and the superior maxillary projects forward, producing a decided prognathism. In the Grenelle race the brow ridges are full and give a slightly oblique direction to the base of the forehead, but the arc soon rises and is regular, the head is harmonic, the cheek bones are prominent, the orbits approach the square form, the nose is sufficiently prominent, and the maxillary bones are prognathous. The men of Grenelle and Furfooz were of small stature, five feet four to five feet six inches. The bones of the limbs and trunk are strong.

Some investigators are disposed to regard these Furfooz races as neolithic or belonging to recent times, but the associated animal forms seem to place them among the Quaternary forms, though perhaps near the close of the Glacial period. The remains of their handicraft would indicate a peaceable people. Their implements were made of flint and reindeer horn. Knives, saws, scrapers, and bodkins were made of the former, and lances or javelins of the latter. The workmanship was inferior to that of the most recent Cro-Magnon men. Skins were used for clothing, and their burial places indicate a belief in another life.

It is probable that this race met with the same fate as the Cro-Magnon; with the retreating ice the animals upon which they lived moved northward and to higher altitudes, the majority of the Furfooz men following, others remained stationary, and these were eventually absorbed by long-headed and short-headed men of the neolithic or polished stone period.

Pruner Bey advanced the hypothesis that this brachycephalic race were the ancestors of a so-called Mongoloid type of man, he considering that a type of man exists uniting the characters of the Mongol proper and the white races, and extending over the greater portion of the north of the old continent and even into America.

While, so far as our knowledge goes, the long-headed races antedated the short-headed, there is no evidence that the latter descended from the former. As we have seen, the long-headed Cro-Magnon and the short-headed Furfooz both had representa-