gibbons.[1] By laying bare the sulcus transversus we have obtained a more fixed point of departure for measuring the height of the skullcap as an expression of the relative extent of the cerebrum. Accordingly, we find that the skull of Pithecanthropus was almost as highly vaulted as that of the Spy and Neanderthal men, remaining, however, far below the vaulting of the skulls of recent men. The exceptionally highly vaulted skull of Hylobates agilis, inclosed, however, a cerebrum that reached nearly to the upward curve of the Neanderthal man. The remaining apes fall in regular series. Cunningham's microcephalous boy Joe has a flatter brain than the gibbon and the chimpanzee.
The breadth indices of the skulls represented here are about the same; therefore the height of each profile curve is an approximate measure for the relative sizes of the cerebrums.
If, then, the former possessor of this cranium was not an ape, and if he possibly walked erect, must he then have been a man?
I think that the ape-like form of the skullcap and its capacity, too small for a man, can not be brought to harmonize with such a conception. Even Cunningham, who has examined the skull, and is convinced that it is human, finds that its ape-like characters greatly predominate, and that there is nothing human about it except its excessive size for an ape. Virchow has also, after a personal examination of the skullcap, very clearly adjudged it, in Leyden and Berlin, as the skull of an ape. So experienced a craniologist as Hamy, in Paris, said, after examining the same, that he never would have supposed it to be human. On the contrary, the most ape-like human skulls that are anywhere known, the Neanderthal, the Spy, and the Australian skulls, were not considered by any as apes. It was only questioned concerning these skulls whether or not their resemblance to the pithecoids should lead us to give to that race a higher phylogenetic significance.
According to the conception which we have of the human skull, the Java skullcap is certainly not a human relic.
But the size also is not adapted to that of the human skull. For it is quite inadmissible to suppose that we are here dealing with a microcephalous skull, not only on account of the great improbability of such a view, but also because its form is quite different. We are certainly acquainted with normal human skulls of an equally small capacity; but
- ↑ As I have been able to remove only a quite small portion of the siliceous matter from the cavity of the skullcap, I, as well as others, had erroneously (as now appears, misled by its different position on the right and left sides) taken the lower edge of the sulcus transversus for its upper one. I now find that it lies considerably higher than I had at first supposed. On the other hand it appears from an examination of a large series of gibbon skulls that the average distance from the superior curved line is somewhat greater than I had previously stated. My present data are therefore more correct than those given in the Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologic 1895, p. 731. The similarity to the gibbon is therefore much greater.
