Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/229

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FOSSIL MAN (ITALY AND OTHER COUNTRIES)
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region, but the superciliary ridges were less prominent. It was, however, too fragmentary to supply more than suggestive results. The portions of the skull found consisted of the frontal and right parietal bone, and their relation to the Neanderthal cranium was discussed by Broca at the meeting of C.A.P. for 1867 (Comptes rendus, p. 395). Mr G. Schwalbe has made an elaborate analysis of its anatomical features in comparison with those of Neanderthal and modern types, and pronounces the Eguisheim skull to be an intermediary form, basing his opinion on the greater height of its forehead. (Ueber die Schaedelformen der æltesten Menschenrassen, 1897.)

The Brüx Skeleton.

In 1882 portion of the skull and other bones of a human skeleton were discovered at Brüx, in Bohemia, buried in what is described as a bed of Quaternary sand. The skull lay 4 feet 8 inches from the surface, of which 2 feet was composed of the ordinary soil. Its contemporaneity with the Quaternary sand is, however, questioned on the ground that near the same place, at a depth of 6¼ inches in the sand, a perforated stone hammer of undoubted Neolithic type was also disinterred. The osseous characters of the Brüx skull place it, according to Hamy, between the Neanderthal and Eguisheim skulls. Those who regard the Brüx skull as Palæolithic account for the presence of the stone hammer in the Quaternary sands by supposing that it had got so far buried in consequence of the usual superficial disturbances caused by the cultivation of the soil. (Mitt, der Anth. Gesell. in Wien, 1872.)

Brünn Skeleton.

In September 1891, in the course of digging a canal at Brünn (Moravia), the workmen came upon an osseous deposit, at a depth of over 4 metres in the loess, containing bones and teeth of the rhinoceros and mammoth, some smaller bones of a brick-red colour, and a few worked discs of stone and bone. As the line of the canal only exposed a portion of the osseous deposit, a special excavation was necessary to secure all the