THE CHARACTERS OF HOMO 439 



animal which he discovered in the island of Java, and 

 which seemed to possess the characters of the long- 

 sought "missing link." He named it Pithecanthropus 

 erectuSj which means "the monkey-man walking erect." 

 Only the upper part of the skull, a couple of teeth, and a 

 femur or thigh bone were found. The structure of the 

 latter was held to establish the erect attitude, but the 

 skull showed very primitive characters. The brain 

 must have been intermediate in size between that of the 

 highest monkey and the lowest man. It is, perhaps, 

 not absolutely certain that the thigh bone belonged to 

 the same animal as the skull, and as the remains are 

 very incomplete, we can only say that we have evidence 

 of a type of Hominidae so primitive that it may be re- 

 garded as constituting a distinct genus. The teeth are 

 more like those of an orang than of a man, and it is 

 possible that Pithecanthropus should be excluded from 

 the Hominidae altogether. 



4. In 1913 Dr. A. Smith Woodward of the British The put- 

 Museum described the remains of a manlike creature 

 found in gravel near Piltdown, Sussex, in the south of 

 England. The fossils consisted of an imperfect skull 

 and a mandible or lower jaw. The skull is very thick, 

 but decidedly human in character, though relatively 

 primitive. The jaw, on the other hand, is like that of 

 a chimpanzee. This strange combination of characters 

 led Dr. Woodward to regard the animal as a distinct 

 genus of Hominidae, to which he gave the name Eoan- 

 thropus, or " man of the dawn." More recently it has 

 been maintained bv able naturalists that two different 



4 



things have been mixed together, and there is apparently 

 little doubt that the jaw really belonged to an extinct 

 species of chimpanzee, living at the same time as the 

 man whose skull was found associated with it. 



