[[Categoria:Pagine che usano RigaIntestazione|Scientia - Vol. IX.djvu{{padleft:129|3|0]]definite picture of the bodily characteristics of Mousterian man. He was short in stature, 5 feet 3 inches in height, but powerfully built and with a disproportionately large head. His face was strangely unlike that of any human race with which we are familiar. A retreating forehead rises out of a broad depression bounded below by the massive frontal torus, which bulges out in a continuous projection above the eyes and nose. The nose, which is broad and large, passes into the glabellar region with a gentle flexure, instead of encountering if abruptly; recalling in this respect the apes rather than the Australians. The sides of the nose are not so sharply defined from the cheeks as in ourselves, but lie almost in the same plane, thus producing a singular snout-like projection. The orbits are large and round. The upper lip is long, and this, together with the long nose, gives an unusual length to the whole face. The massive lower jaw is without a chin. Prognathism exists to a various extent; sometimes it is very marked, at others almost absent. A similar wide range of variation in this respect is to be observed among the native Australians.

The Mousterian skulls are the oldest human skulls of which we have any knowledge; but, just as in the case of the Magdalenian and Solutrian, they indicate that the primitive inhabitants of France were distinguished from the highest civilized races, not by a smaller, but by a larger cranial capacity; in other words, as ice proceed backwards in time the human brain increases rather than decreases in volume.

This result is the more surprising, when we consider that the skull which at presents makes the nearest approach to the Mousterian in its morphological characters is that of the Australian aborigines with a mean capacity of only 1250 c.c. In this respect, though certainly not in others, the Australian skull would seem to be far more primitive than that of Mousterian man.

It seems probable also that the Mousterians had reached a comparatively high stage in the evolution of religious ideas : the skeletons found at La Chappelle-aux-Saintes and Le Moustier had evidently been interred in a primitive kind of tomb; and not only had their weapons been buried along with the deceased, but in the case of La Chapelle-aux-Saintes the leg