20 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



pit has been worked for some time for road-mending flints 

 and thither occasionally came Mr. Charles Dawson, a local 

 lawyer and antiquarian, to secure the flint implements which 

 from time to time came to light. One day a workman gave 

 Mr. Dawson a fragment of the skull parietal. This started a 

 long search, ultimately resulting in the finding of other char- 

 acteristic portions of the cranium, a ramus of the jaw with 

 several molars in situ, a canine tooth, and two nasal bones. 

 These fragments, which represented what was at first an entire 

 skull unwittingly shattered by a workman's pick, were sub- 

 mitted to Doctor Arthur Smith Woodward of the British 

 Museum, who began the laborious process of reconstruction 

 of a complete skull from the several isolated pieces. It is but 

 natural that among the several workers who essayed the same 

 task, Smith Woodward, Keith, and McGregor, there should 

 be some difference of opinion, which is manifest principally in 

 a little variation as to the estimate of skull capacity. But in 

 the main there is agreement as to the general form. The 

 cranium is extremely thick-walled, averaging four tenths of 

 an inch, with a rather steep, though contracted and ape-like 

 forehead, and one that lacks the prominent brow-ridges of 

 Neandertal man. The skull was nicely balanced on the neck as 

 in ourselves, implying an erect posture in further contrast to 

 the men of Neandertal. The brain-cast was submitted to the 

 high authority of Professor Elliot Smith, who pronounced it 

 the "most primitive and most simian human brain thus far 

 recorded." 



The jaw has proved to be a veritable bone of contention. 

 Everything pointed to community of origin with the cranium, 

 except its remarkably primitive character. One American 

 authority, G. S. Miller, Jr., who studied, not the original but 

 a cast, came to the conclusion that the jaw and skull could not 

 possibly pertain to the same individual or even the same genus, 

 but that the former was that of a fossil chimpanzee, to which 



