Sir Arthur Smith Woodward 273 



could not talk — at least, as we understand talking — 

 although they could doubtless make sounds which were 

 understood by one another. The jaw lacks the inside 

 ridge to which muscles controlling the tongue of a 

 1 talking man ' are attached. Yet the back teeth were 

 human teeth,- and the top of the skull has human charac- 

 teristics. The ancient race to which the Piltdown woman 

 belonged were not apes, but men. They walked more 

 or less erect, and probably used weapons of some kind, 

 rough flints and clubs with which they killed animals for 

 food. Whether they were able to make fire or not we do 

 not know. 



Since the discovery of the Piltdown skull another skull 

 of immense age has been found in South Africa. Its dis- 

 coverers consider that this may belong to the Pliocene 

 epoch — that is, that it may be half a million years old — but 

 the best authorities do not consider that these remains 

 are human. They belong definitely to the ape family. 

 This particular ape, however, seems to have been inter- 

 mediate between living apes and mankind. 



No one can tell the age of the human race, but flint 

 implements have been found which date from long before 

 the last Ice Age. In a paper read some years ago before 

 the British Association Dr Allan Sturge spoke of bronze 

 implements found in Egypt by Professor Flinders Petrie 

 which were some fifteen thousand years old. " But," he 

 said, " I shall take you, by the aid of these flints before 

 me, immeasurably further back." 



He showed his audience a wedge-shaped piece of flint, 

 the marks on which told him, he said, that the stone had 

 been used daily by a man of the Palaeolithic (Old Stone) 

 Age in a village in England. This man had thrown it 

 away, and for thousands of years it had lain idle, until a 

 Neolithic (New Stone) man had come along and chipped 

 it afresh for his own purposes. Then he too had thrown 

 it away, and it had lain deeply hidden beneath the 



