THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 

 PILTDOWN DISCOVERY 



By A. G. TRACKER, A.R.C.Sc. 

 Curator of the Public Museum, Gloucester 



It is often the fate of technical words to serve their purpose and 

 become obsolete. It was so with the word " Invertebrata." The 

 earlier naturalists saw that there was a great group of animals 

 clearly related to one another by the possession of a vertebral 

 column. And it appeared to these earlier scholars that the 

 lower organisms which lacked this characteristic might be 

 regarded as akin to one another and thrown together into a 

 single sub-kingdom called the " Invertebrata." But with the 

 progress of zoology it came to be realised that the various 

 divisions of the invertebrates differed from one another quite as 

 much as, and in some cases more than, each differed from the 

 Vertebrata ; and hence the term " Invertebrata " was altogether 

 discarded by zoologists. 



The recent advances in prehistoric anthropology have been 

 so remarkable that it seems probable that a like fate will over- 

 take the word "Paleolithic." When in the year 1865 the late 

 Lord Avebury (then Sir John Lubbock) proposed that the Stone 

 Age should be divided into two periods, his suggestion very 

 aptly expressed the facts of prehistory as they were then known, 

 at least so far as Europe is concerned. The people of the later 

 or Neolithic division lived in our own geological period ; they 

 were certainly our own direct ancestors ; and they were semi- 

 civilised, building huts, understanding agriculture, and possess- 

 ing divers domestic animals. Behind these Neolithic peoples, 

 separated from them in many places by a great interval of time 

 —the so-called " hiatus "—and living under very different 

 geographical circumstances, various entirely savage races were 

 known to have existed. These flourished during the Pleistocene 

 or Glacial Period, being consequently surrounded by extinct 

 animals such as the mammoth, the cave-bear, the cave-hyena, 

 Rhinoceros antiquitatis and others ; they dwelt mainly in 



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