TWO SKULLS AT M. S. U.
Time-Yellowed Memorials of a Long-
Forgotten Period.
In a little basement room beneath the principal building of the University of Missouri at Columbia is a glass case containing, among queer-shaped stones and knives and pipes, two human skulls, imperfectly preserved. The curious freshmen who stroll into this room by accident during the hours that it is left open sometimes pause and gaze Hamlet-like at the cracked and yellow craniums.
"I'll bet that one must be almost a thousand years old," they will remark. Then they will sigh, awestruck, at the contemplation of so much antiquity, and pass along to something less depressing.
When they are told the true ages of these skulls, neither they nor anyone else can form any adequate idea of it. One of them is called the Neanderthal skull, and was found in a cave in Central Europe. The formation in which it was found led experts to declare it was more that 100,000 years old. Its chief peculiarity is a heavy bony ridge above the eyebrows. The brain capacity is much less than that of the historical man.
An even older skull is that of the man of Java, which has almost no forehead. It was found underneath thirty feet of sandstone. The brain capacity is just half of that of a modern man. Ethnologists estimate the age of this skull at 300,000 years.
The anthropological museum was started four years ago by Dr. Charles Ellwood, professor of sociology at the university. It is used as a laboratory for the students of ethnology.
