The descent of man / Wilhelm Boelsche.

  • Wilhelm Bölsche
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The descent of man / Wilhelm Boelsche. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    16 THE DESCENT OF MAN more than respectable elephant bones, without any relation to aboriginal man. But we men of to-day have in this, respect something more than suppositions, we possess absolute scien¬ tific indications that in days, not by any means so very remote, men existed who were different in appearance, in many respects, from any living ones. We possess, as already mentioned, remains of human bones that belonged to men living in the glacial period, the time of the mammoths. These men of the glacial time who after all are near to us compared with those of the times that are quite remote, were not in certain traits of their culture, essen¬ tially behind that possessed by some wild races of to-day; there are to-day, in South America, tribes who have no know¬ ledge of metals, who manufacture all their tools and weapons from stone or horn or wood; thus, properly speaking, still living in the stone-age like those old mammoth-hunters them¬ selves. Indeed, in the second half of the long and changeful glacial period the remnants of bones point to a race of man which, at the apogee of its distinguishing marks, was not much different from the races of to-day. But in the first, older half, things take a somewhat differ¬ ent aspect. In an unmistakable manner the bodily construction of pre-historic men now shows differences from that of all living men, including all savage races of to-day. To be sure, that they too were men we can never doubt. But some¬ thing strange, something deviating from all known men strikes us in this older type. From the bones we can to-day recon¬ struct the portrait in some fashion. In the year 1856, for the first time, such genuine human bones with oddly deviating marks, were discovered and handed over for scientific examination. They were found in the Nean- der-Valley near Düsseldorf. Workmen cleared out an old cave. There they came upon a skeleton, partly decayed, under a heap of two yards of clay. An expert. Dr. Fuhlrott, came upon the scene and saved what he could of the bones. They arrived at the museum, the provincial museum of Bonn, which to-day houses this treasure. With astonishment we see here the skull of a man which appears remarkably flat in the curve over the brain. On the other hand, it shows above the eye-sockets thick un¬ shapely protruding ridges which give to the whole forehead
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