We may next consider the Neanderthal group of skulls, so named after the first of that type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley close to Dusseldorf in the Rhine basin.  A narrow head, with low and retreating forehead, and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at least twice the brain capacity of any gorilla, set the learned world disputing whether this was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot.  It was unfortunate that there were no proofs to hand of the age of these relics.  After a while, however, similar specimens began to come in.  Thus in 1866 the jaw of a woman, displaying a tendency to chinlessness combined with great strength, was found in the Cave of La Naulette in Belgium, associated with more or less dateable remains of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer.  A few years earlier, though its importance was not appreciated at the moment, there had been discovered, near Forbes’ quarry at Gibraltar, the famous Gibraltar skull, now to be seen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London.  Any visitor will notice at the first glance that this is no man of to-day.  There are the narrow head, low crown, and prominent brow-ridge as before, supplemented by the most extraordinary eye-holes that were ever seen, vast circles widely separated from each other.  And other peculiar features will reveal themselves on a close inspection; for instance, the horseshoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth are arranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the face due to the absence of the depressions that in our own case run down on each side from just outside the nostrils towards the corners of the mouth.

And now at the present time we have twenty or more individuals of this Neanderthal type to compare.  The latest discoveries are perhaps the most interesting, because in two and perhaps other cases the man has been properly buried.  Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the French department of Correze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closely recalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floor of a low grotto.  It lay on its back, head to the west, with one arm bent towards the head, the other outstretched, and the legs drawn up.  Some bison bones lay in the grave as if a food-offering had been made.  Hard by were flint implements of a well-marked Mousterian type.  In the shelter of Le Moustier itself a similar burial was discovered.  The body lay on its right side, with the right arm bent so as to support the head upon a carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the left arm was stretched out, so that the hand might be near a magnificent oval stone-weapon chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by design.  So much for these men of the Neanderthal type, denizens of the mid-palaeolithic world at the very latest.  Ape-like they doubtless are in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all their separate features occur here and there amongst modern Australian natives.  And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believe in a life after death.  There is something to think about in that.