United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Finally, the comparatively large cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid bony walls, and the completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, together with the very fair development of the Engis skull, clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence Man has proceeded need no longer be sought, by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development, in the newest Tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the Elephas primigenius than that is from us."
From the cave of Engihoul, opposite that of Engis, on the right bank of the Meuse, Schmerling obtained the remains of three other individuals of Man, among which were only two fragments of parietal bones, but many bones of the extremities. A short letter from M. Geoffroy St.
"But the amount of variation of the Borreby skulls, and the fact that the skulls of one of the purest and most homogeneous of existing races of men can be proved to differ from one another in the same characters, though perhaps not quite to the same extent, as the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, seem to me to prohibit any cautious reasoner from affirming the latter to have been necessarily of distinct races.
Schmerling in a sufficient state of integrity to enable the anatomist to speculate on the race to which it belonged, was buried 5 feet deep in a breccia, in which the tooth of a rhinoceros, several bones of a horse, and some of the reindeer, together with some ruminants, occurred. On the right bank of the Meuse, on the opposite side of the river to Engis, is the cavern of Engihoul.
Modern science accepts the antiquity of the Neanderthal man, but the controversy has never ceased. The great Virchow declared the peculiarities of the bones to be the result of disease. Near Liege, in Belgium, not more than seventy miles from the Neanderthal, the Engis skull was found. After careful measurement it was proved not to differ materially from the skulls of modern Europeans.
"The Engis skull, perhaps the oldest known, is," according to Prof. Huxley, "a fair average skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brain of a savage." In this opinion Mr.
Schmerling being careful, whenever a fragment of such presented itself, to explore the cavern himself, and see whether any other bones of the same skeleton could be found. In the Engis cavern, distant about eight miles to the south-west of Liege, on the left bank of the Meuse, the remains of at least three human individuals were disinterred.
"The Engis skull, as originally figured by Professor Schmerling, was in a very imperfect state; but other fragments have since been added to it by the care of Dr. From the middle of the occipital foramen to the middle of the roof of each orbit, the base of the skull is destroyed, and the facial bones are entirely absent.
And there can be no doubt that the physical geography of Europe has changed wonderfully, since the bones of Men and Mammoths, Hyaenas and Rhinoceroses were washed pell-mell into the cave of Engis.
It is so universally recognised that we take a pretty girl, like original sin or the curse of labour, as a chose jugee. Her sway must have begun with the glacial drifters and the kitchen middeners and the Engis skull man, when they and the rest of the paleoliths were battling with the dodo and the dinornis and the didifornis, and had no time for the cult of beauty except by proxy.
Word Of The Day