Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/465

Rh nose straight rather than arched, the lips somewhat thick, the maxillary (jaw and cheek) bones strongly developed, the complexion very brown, the hair very dark and growing low on the forehead—a whole which, without being attractive, was in no way repulsive."

The prehistoric antiquity of the Cro-Magnon type in this region is attested in two distinct ways. In the first place, the people possessed no knowledge of the metals; they were in the same stage of culture as, perhaps even lower than, the American aborigines at the coming of Columbus. Their implements were fashioned entirely of stone, although it was often cunningly chipped and even polished. They were ignorant of the arts, either of agriculture or the domestication of animals, in both of which they were far below the culture of the native tribes of Africa at the present day. Additional proof of their antiquity was offered by the animal remains found intermingled with the human bones. The climate must have been very different from that of the present, for many of the fauna then living in the region, such as the reindeer, are now confined to the cold regions of northern Europe. To be sure, the great mammals, such as the mammoth, mastodon, the cave bear, and hyena, had already become extinct. They were contemporaneous with a still more ancient and uncultured type of man, whose remains occur in a lower geological stratum. This Cro-Magnon race is not of glacial antiquity, yet the distribution of mammals was markedly different from that of to-day. Thus of nineteen species found in the Cro-Magnon cave, ten no longer existed in southern Europe. They had migrated with the change of climate toward the north. The men alone seem to have remained in or near their early settlements, through all the changes of time and the vicissitudes of history. It is perhaps the most striking instance known of a persistency of population unchanged through thousands of years.

It should not be understood that this Cro-Magnon type was originally restricted to this little region alone. Its geographical extension was once very wide. The classical skull of Engis, in Belgium, so well described by Huxley in Man's Place in Nature, was of this type. It has been located in places all the way from Tagolsheim and Bollwiller in Alsace to the Atlantic on the west. Ranke asserts that it occurs to-day in the hills of Thuringia, and was a prevalent type there in the past. Its extension to the south and west was equally wide. It was the type common among the extinct Guanches of the Canary Islands. Dr. Collignon has