The Mentone Man

This man was a Frenchman; or at least his skeleton was found in a cave at Mentone, near Nice, in France.

The skeleton was almost perfect when found (March, 1872), and showed its owner to have been a tall, well-formed, good-looking man, with an average skull, and a facial angle of eighty-five degrees.

The antiquity of this skeleton is undoubted; for his bones are associated with those of the cave-lion, cave-bear, and other extinct animals.

The bones of this skeleton were all in place, surrounded by flint implements and the bones of animals supposed to have been killed by him. Twenty-two perforated teeth lay by his head, and are supposed to have formed a chaplet.

His name is, of course, unknown; but his bones, with the Dutchman's skull found in a cave near Engis, are the oldest known human bones in existence.

They are great aids in proving that ancient races had as much brain-room as ourselves, and were not a mere development of a lower race of animals.