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So, for one reason or another, we have often to put up with that very unsatisfactory single-figure description of the head-form which is known as the cranial index. You take the greatest length and greatest breadth of the skull, and write down the result obtained by dividing the former into the latter when multiplied by 100. Medium-headed people have an index of anything between 75 and 80.
We have sufficiently considered the use to which the particular race-mark of head-form has been put in the attempted classification of the very early men who have left their bones behind them.
Below that figure men rank as long-headed, above it as round-headed. This test, however, as I have hinted, will not by itself carry us far. On the other hand, I believe that a good judge of head-form in all its aspects taken together will generally be able to make a pretty shrewd guess as to the people amongst whom the owner of a given skull is to be placed.
Without going outside Europe, we have, however, to reckon with at least two other types of very early head-form. In one of the caves of Mentone known as La Grotte des Enfants two skeletons from a low stratum were of a primitive type, but unlike the Neanderthal, and have been thought to show affinities to the modern negro.
The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads; the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, have long heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, or nearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences of head-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark is liable to deceive.
They are known as the Cro-Magnon race, after a group of them discovered in a rock shelter of that name on the banks of the Vezere. These particular people can be shown to be Aurignacian that is to say, to have lived just after the Mousterian men of the Neanderthal head-form.
The Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly developed. The forehead is high, and the chin shapely, whilst neither the brow-ridge nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neanderthal type. Whether this race survives in modern Europe is, as was said in the last chapter, highly uncertain.
Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the French department of Correze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closely recalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floor of a low grotto. It lay on its back, head to the west, with one arm bent towards the head, the other outstretched, and the legs drawn up. Some bison bones lay in the grave as if a food-offering had been made.
He would have to get to work, therefore, on their bony parts, and doubtless would attack the skulls for choice. By considering head-form and colour, then, we may help to cover a certain amount of the ground, vast as it is.
Ape-like they doubtless are in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all their separate features occur here and there amongst modern Australian natives. And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believe in a life after death. There is something to think about in that.
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