Still, there was always a gap--a place unfilled--between the large-brained, small-jawed man and the small-brained, large-jawed ape. The link was missing. It was hoped, when in 1859 the human workmanship of the flint axes found with the bones of extinct animals in our river gravels was recognized, that the bones of the men who made the flint axes would turn up alongside of them, and that they would show characters intermediate between those of modern man and the great apes. But no such human bones ever were found in the older gravels deposited as terraces along their beds by the rivers of Western Europe. Human bones, and more or less complete human skulls, of a highly-developed modern type (the Cromagnards) were found in caves associated with flint tools of a different character to those common in river gravels. Then we heard a good deal about the strangely flat skull-top, or calvaria, found in a cave near Dusseldorf on the Rhine, associated with the preaching of a certain hermit named "Neuman" (= Neander). The valley was called "the Neanderthal," and the skull-top thus came to be called the "Neanderthal skull." Some authorities regarded the Neanderthal skull as that of an outcast idiot! Huxley studied it minutely, and compared it to that of Southern Australian black-fellows, and held that it took us no nearer to the apes than they did. Then an unsatisfactory small flat skull-top, together with a long, straight thigh-bone, was found in a gravel in Java, and the name "Pithecanthropus" was applied to these remains. Still we had got no nearer to any knowledge of the missing link.
Of late years we have, however, learnt a great deal more about the race or species of men of which the Neanderthal skull-top was the first indication. We now know that this species of man belonged to a period older than that of the other prehistoric cavemen--the artistic Magdalenians and the bushman-like Aurignacians, which are races of Homo sapiens, not distinct species. The older period is called the Moustierian, or Middle Paleolithic, period, and is marked by a peculiar type of flint implement. It is later than the older river gravels, in which big tongue-shaped and almond-shaped flint implements are common. The two skulls and bones from the cave of Spey, in Belgium, the Gibraltar skull, and the skeletons and skulls of the cavern called the Chapelle aux Saints in the Corrèze (Central France), and of Ferassy, and some neighbouring localities, all belong to this Moustierian age (so named after the village "Le Moustier," in Perigord), and to the peculiar species Homo Neanderthalensis.[10] It is also necessary to include here the more ancient man indicated by the important lower jaw found by Schottensack near Heidelberg (see Fig. 25). The Neanderman or Neanderthal-man had a low forehead, with overhanging bony brow-ridges, and a depressed, flattened brain-case, which, nevertheless, was very long and broad and held an unusually large brain, measuring 1600 cubic centimetres, whereas the modern European averages 1450 only of such units. He had a powerful lower jaw, with a broad, upstanding piece or vertical "ramus," and no chin protuberance. Yet his teeth were identical with those of a modern man. His thigh-bones were much curved, and his arms a good deal longer in proportion to his legs than those of a modern man. He did not carry himself upright, but with a forward stoop.