u/The_Pale_Blue_Dot

So I'm doing a reread of the series and just finished COS. When Harry sees the giant statue of Salazar Slytherin, he noticed that Salazar's face was "ancient and monkeyish." Monkeyish is a bit of an...unusual way to describe a face, no?

But then I remembered in HBP, Marvolo Gaunt is described thusly: "This man was shorter than the first, and oddly proportioned; his shoulders were very broad and his arms overlong, which, with his bright brown eyes, short scrubby hair, and wrinkled face, gave him the look of a powerful, aged monkey." Again, kind of an unusual descriptor.

What I'm getting from this is that Salazar Slytherin himself had monkeyish features which were inherited all the way down the line to Marvolo (and possibly his children), with a special heaping helping of inbreeding to exaggerate those features. Kinda funny, kinda interesting!