Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/249

Rh another extinct species even closer to modern man. More than a score of practically complete skeletons and hundreds of fragmentary bones of this the Neanderthal man have been found in France, Spain and Germany. It is chiefly in the characters of the skull rather than in the other bones of the skeleton that he differs from modern man. His forehead was very receding, his brain capacity was just a little less than that of the most primitive of existing savage tribes; his brow ridges were more prominent than those of the negro, his chin was approximately half way between the chinless profile of the Heidelberg man and the clearly defined chin of the white race of today. With his petrified bones there are frequently found the stone spearheads and the bone knives which he fashioned. To this array of facts concerning him, I want to add just one inference. Many skulls of Neanderthal type were broken when found, as though struck with a hammer on top of the head either at the moment of death or very shortly thereafter. Several tribes of aborigines in recent years break the skulls of their dead in order, as they say, to permit the spirit to start on its journey to the happy hunting round. The inference is that the Neanderthal man, a couple of hundred thousand years ago, had the same thought that man was immortal.

During the last of the glacial stages, about the same time that the ice pushed southward across Ohio and Indiana to the Ohio river, 40,060 or 50,000 years ago, there lived in southern Europe a race of men known as the Cro-Magnons. They were stalwart highbrows with prominent chins and large brain capacity, and eyebrow ridges no more protruding than those of the existing white race, but with massive cheekbones like the North American Indian. Clearly they belonged to the sane species as that which today includes the white, yellow, brown and red races, but they cannot be included in any of these races. Their implements were much better manufactured than those-of their predecessors, the Neanderthals, and they had a remarkable artistic ability as shown by the pictures they engraved or painted on the walls of caves in southern France. For thousands of years they maintained their life in urope, but about 10,000 years ago they were displaced by the first members of the races of mankind which are today in existence.

During all this time no known record of the presence of man or man-like creatures was left in either North or South America. Not until the ice sheets of the latest glacial episode had dwindled nearly to disappearance was any clear indication of man's presence left in the New World. The oldest human inhabitants of North America were members of the existing races of mankind. They reached this continent not more than 10,000 or 12,000 years ago.

The facts stated in the foregoing paragraphs have been discovered by many different individuals. Probably no one man could be found who could testify to all of them as having been personally observed by himself. Knowledge of them is the common property of countless scientists. I can, however, affirm the truth of many of these facts from personal observations; the others I believe to be true because of my confidence in the technical ability and integrity of those who have seen the actual evidence. I have also studied many of the specimens collected by those fellow-workers and now on exhibition in various museums. In 1916 and 1917 I examined the oldest known rocks of the Archeozoic era in eastern Ontario and was unable to discover any fossil remains in them. The presence of these rocks had already been made known by a Canadian geologic survey party. I was accompanied by four or five of my students. In this bleak and windswept waste of rounded rock hills and impassable swamps, these ancient rocks are cleanly displayed. On the same trip I saw in slightly younger rocks of the same era in that locality the evidence of the