1. The people who inhabited this island in the Old Stone Age appear to have been confined to the south; for no palaeolithic implement has yet been found further north than Lincoln, or, as some maintain, the East Riding of Yorkshire.[1535] An attempt has indeed been made to prove that such tools were used in Scotland;[1536] but the best judges are unanimously of opinion that the contention has not been established.[1537]
Little direct evidence exists as to the physical type of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain. Only four human skulls have been found in England which can be referred to that period,--one at Galley Hill, near Swanscombe,[1538] one at Westley, near Bury St. Edmunds,[1539] and two in the Cattedown cave near Plymouth:[1540] but it is not certain that the first was contemporaneous with the beds which contained it:[1541] of the second only fragments remained from which it was impossible to determine the contour;[1542] and the others could not be removed entire. Almost all the older palaeolithic skulls, however, which have been discovered in Western Europe belong apparently to the same race,[1543] which may have been represented among the hunters who entered Britain when it still formed part of the Continent. Indeed the Galley Hill skull, whether it belonged to a palaeolithic man or not, has certain characteristics of the most famous representative of the race,--the Neanderthal skull, which was discovered about the middle of the last century in the valley of the Neander in Rhenish Prussia.[1544] The skulls of this type are extraordinarily dolichocephalic; and the people to whom they belonged had extremely low and retreating foreheads, heavy and projecting lower jaws, and amazingly prominent brow ridges, and were short, big-boned, and muscular.[1545]
But what if the Neanderthal skull was not human? If that poor creature had but known how famous he, or it, was to become! His broken cranium has a bibliography of its own. Virchow, who, however, late in life changed his mind, at one time regarded it as abnormal,--pathological. Huxley and Broca vigorously defended its respectability; and at the end of the nineteenth century the most eminent anthropologists of Europe and America accepted it as the type of the most ancient of the known races of men. But in 1901 a German anthropologist, Dr. G. Schwalbe, wrote an article of appalling length,[1546] which disturbed settled convictions. Huxley had pronounced the Neanderthal to be the most ape-like of all known human skulls: Schwalbe refused to regard it as human, in the accepted sense, at all. For him it represents a distinct species, intermediate between the _Pithecanthropus_ of Java--the famous ‘missing link’, whose remains were discovered a few years ago by Dr. Dubois--and man himself. In the same class Schwalbe places the skulls of Spy, which have always been grouped along with that of Neanderthal; and he insists that all the human palaeolithic skulls of Europe, however closely they may appear to resemble these, are in reality different.[1547] ‘In the Neanderthal skull,’ says Dr. Laloy, in a lucid summary of Schwalbe’s article, which will satisfy all who are not specialists, ‘the greatest length coincides with the “inio-glabellar” diameter,’ that is to say, the diameter measured from the space between the supraciliary, or brow, ridges and the sinus at the back of the neck: this, he adds, is never the case in man. No, not in man as we know him. But what sense are we to attach to the word ‘human’? Was there ever a creature of whom it could be affirmed that he was the first man?[1548]